"You dogs!" said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front,
except as to the spots on his nose: "I would ride over any of you
very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which
rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently
near it, he should be crushed under the wheels."
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience
of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it,
that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the
men, not one. But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily,
and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to
notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the
other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word
"Go on!"
He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick
succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General,
the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the
Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came
whirling by.
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