"If we are still going to dispute, there was no point in having M. Sorel in."
"We know that monsieur has many ideas," said the duke irritably, looking at the interrupter who was an old Napoleonic general.
Julien saw that these words contained some personal and very offensive allusion.
Everybody smiled, the turncoat general appeared beside himself with rage.
"There is no longer a Pitt, gentlemen," went on the speaker with all the despondency of a man who has given up all hope of bringing his listeners to reason.
"If there were a new Pitt in England, you would not dupe a nation twice over by the same means."
"That's why a victorious general, a Buonaparte, will be henceforward impossible in France," exclaimed the military interrupter.
On this occasion neither the president nor the duke ventured to get angry, though Julien thought he read in their eyes that they would very much like to have done so.
They lowered their eyes, and the duke contented himself with sighing in quite an audible manner.
But the speaker was put upon his mettle.
"My audience is eager for me to finish," he said vigorously, completely discarding that smiling politeness and that balanced diction that Julien thought had expressed his character so well. "It is eager for me to finish, it is not grateful to me for the efforts I am making to offend nobody's ears, however long they may be.
Well, gentlemen, I will be brief.
"I will tell you in quite common words: England has not got a sou with which to help the good cause.
If Pitt himself were to come back he would never succeed with all his genius in duping the small English landowners, for they know that the short Waterloo campaign alone cost them a milliard of francs.
As you like clear phrases," continued the speaker, becoming more and more animated, "I will say this to you: Help yourselves, for England has not got a guinea left to help you with, and when England does not pay, Austria, Russia and Prussia—who will only have courage but have no money—cannot launch more than one or two campaigns against France.
"One may hope that the young soldiers who will be recruited by the Jacobins will be beaten in the first campaign, and possibly in the second; but, even though I seem a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes, in the third campaign—in the third campaign I say—you will have the soldiers of 1794 who were no longer the soldiers enlisted in 1792."
At this point interruption broke out simultaneously from three or four quarters.
"Monsieur," said the president to Julien, "Go and make a precis in the next room of the beginning of the report which you have written out."
Julien went out to his great regret.
The speaker was just dealing with the question of probabilities which formed the usual subject for his meditations.
"They are frightened of my making fun of them," he thought.
When he was called back, M. de la Mole was saying with a seriousness which seemed quite humorous to Julien who knew him so well,
"Yes, gentlemen, one finds the phrase, 'is it god, table or tub?' especially applicable to this unhappy people.
'It is god' exclaims the writer of fables.
It is to you, gentlemen, that this noble and profound phrase seems to apply.
Act on your own initiative, and noble France will appear again, almost such as our ancestors made her, and as our own eyes have seen her before the death of Louis XVI.
"England execrates disgraceful Jacobinism as much as we do, or at any rate her noble lords do. Without English gold, Austria and Prussia would only be able to give battle two or three times.
Would that be sufficient to ensure a successful occupation like the one which M. de Richelieu so foolishly failed to exploit in 1817?
I do not think so."
At this point there was an interruption which was stifled by the hushes of the whole room.
It came again from the old Imperial general who wanted the blue ribbon and wished to figure among the authors of the secret note.
"I do not think so," replied M. de la Mole, after the uproar had subsided. He laid stress on the "I" with an insolence which charmed Julien.
"That's a pretty piece of acting," he said to himself, as he made his pen almost keep pace with the marquis' words.
M. de la Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat with a well turned phrase.
"It is not only on foreign powers," continued the marquis in a more even tone, "on whom we shall be able to rely for a new military occupation.
All those young men who write inflammatory articles in the Globe will provide you with three or four thousand young captains among whom you may find men with the genius, but not the good intentions of a Kleber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru."
"We did not know how to glorify him," said the president.
"He should have been immortalized."
"Finally, it is necessary for France to have two parties," went on M. de la Mole; "but two parties not merely in name, but with clear-cut lines of cleavage.
Let us realise what has got to be crushed.
On the one hand the journalists and the electors, in a word, public opinion; youth and all that admire it.
While it is stupefying itself with the noise of its own vain words, we have certain advantages of administrating the expenditure of the budget."
At this point there was another interruption.
"As for you, monsieur," said M. de la Mole to the interrupter, with an admirable haughtiness and ease of manner, "you do not spend, if the words chokes you, but you devour the forty thousand francs put down to you in the State budget, and the eighty thousand which you receive from the civil list."
"Well, monsieur, since you force me to it, I will be bold enough to take you for an example.
Like your noble ancestors, who followed Saint Louis to the crusade, you ought in return for those hundred and twenty thousand francs to show us at any rate a regiment; a company, why, what am I saying? say half a company, even if it only had fifty men, ready to fight and devoted to the good cause to the point of risking their lives in its service.
You have nothing but lackeys, who in the event of a rebellion would frighten you yourselves."
"Throne, Church, Nobility are liable to perish to-morrow, gentlemen, so long as you refrain from creating in each department a force of five hundred devoted men, devoted I mean, not only with all the French courage, but with all the Spanish constancy.
"Half of this force ought to be composed of our children, our nephews, of real gentlemen, in fact.
Each of them will have beside him not a little talkative bourgeois ready to hoist the tricolor cockade, if 1815 turns up again, but a good, frank and simple peasant like Cathelineau.