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carried across the large room. She was scolding him for being late. His answers were inaudible, but his hands moved in the gesture of a child defending himself.
    â€œIf he were a guest she could feel he’d behaved badly,” Woerth said, with contempt. “But since he’s morally and immorally the head of the house, she might spare us the intimacies.”
    â€œHe’s quite a good fellow,” Ligny said. “Intelligent—and he has the energy of the devil.”
    â€œI’m not denying his talents,” Woerth said. “But I disapprove of them. He has the General Council in his pocket—or enough of it. If it has a protest to make, he hears of it beforehand and sees to it that it doesn’t come to anything.” He looked at Piriac. “It seems to me a pity not to curb him—when we could.”
    Piriac said nothing. Either he missed the disapproval of his laxness—if it were laxness and not simply Bergeot’s flattery which made him leave, in practice, almost all the Prefect’s peace-time powers still in his hands. Or, which was morelikely, it gave him a malicious pleasure to annoy Woerth, even when it involved favouring a civilian. . . . He had only learned in the last week that Mme de Freppel was Bergeot’s mistress. He had not accustomed his mind to it yet. He had strict ideas, and he disliked irregularity. Marrying at thirty, he had been a faithful husband during the twenty-nine years his wife lived to enjoy her ailments. But, just as he was never surprised when he heard that a Protestant or an atheist had stolen public funds, so, without realising it, he had a lower standard for civilians than for soldiers: the Prefect’s morals seemed to him infinitely less vicious than a careless groom. If he had had only to do with horses during his career, Piriac would have merited his name as a humane general.
    As soon as he could, while Bergeot was apologising to General Piriac, Rienne slipped away. He looked for his hostess. She was nowhere to be seen now. But when he was passing a screen drawn across a window he heard her voice, followed by a familiar muffled boom.
    â€œ. . . my dear Countess, my nephew is a-ah young man of the highest ability. I assure you. If you can prevail on the Prefect to find a place for him, you will be doing a service to the Department—I say nothing of the service to me and the young man’s parents. After all, why should all the future intelligence of the country be sacrificed in this war?”
    Rienne decided not to interrupt.

Chapter 4
    The road from Mme de Freppel’s house into Seuilly followed the Loire the whole way, between the countryside asleep and the silent river—silent except that now and then a movement begun undersea ended its life here with a scarcely perceptible sigh among the reeds growing at the edge. He could only hear this sound if he stood quiet to listen. A shrew-mouse, disturbed by his footsteps, ran across the road and vanished, a shadow, in the grass. It was at last almost cool.
    As he came into Seuilly he walked along the Quai Gambetta, between pollarded trees of the same height like ninepins, and the screen of pallid houses of all sizes, their doorways scribbling an illegible sentence along the lower edge; almost every window was shut to keep out the mist that for a bare hour at sunrise would cover the Loire. Behind and above them, on its cliff, the Prefecture cut the sky with its long roof and one delicate tower. Rienne passed the end of the bridge over the Loire; instead of taking the shortest road to the barracks, he kept along the embankment, here the Quai d’Angers. Just beyond the piled-up tables of the Café Buran he saw a man leaning against the wall of the river. When he drew level, the man turned his head; it was Louis Mathieu, editor of the
Seuilly Journal.
    Mathieu had taken off his hat, and in the darkness it was still possible to see the one feature in which he looked