"But what has taken you? Why are you going over to the bourgeois?" he continued violently, again planting himself before the innkeeper. "You said yourself it would have to burst up!"
Rasseneur blushed slightly.
"Yes, I said so. And if it does burst up, you will see that I am no more of a coward than any one else. Only I refuse to be among those who increase the mess in order to fish out a position for themselves."
Étienne blushed in his turn. The two men no longer shouted, having become bitter and spiteful, conquered by the coldness of their rivalry. It was at bottom that which always strains systems, making one man revolutionary in the extreme, pushing the other to an affectation of prudence, carrying them, in spite of themselves, beyond their true ideas into those fatal parts which me
