"Bravo, Billet!" cried the multitude. "To the altar, with the priest."
Encouraged by the acclamations, Billet lugged out from his hall the first priest who had given the signal for counter-revolution.
"I am a martyr," groaned the priest, comprehending that resistance was impossible in the farmer's vigorous hands, "I call for martyrdom!" And as he was hurried along he sang "Good Lord, deliver us!"
This crowd conducting him was the cause of the turbulence towards which Pitou was marching his cohort. But on seeing the reason, he and Catherine appealed to the farmer with the same voice.
Untouched, the latter carried the prize up to the altar where he let him fall.
"I proclaim you unworthy to serve at this altar which you disdained," said Billet: "no man should go up these steps unless his head is filled with these feelings, the desire of liberty, devotion to the country and love of mankind. Priest, have you these sentiments? if so, go up boldly and invoke our Maker. But if you do not feel you are the foremost of us all as a citizen, give place to the more worthy, and be off!"
"Madman, you do not know what you are declaring war upon," hissed the priest, retiring with uplifted finger.
"I do know, if they are like you, vipers, foxes, wolves," returned Billet: "all that sneak and poison and tear in the shade. Come at me, then--I can face ye, in the open!" he concluded, smiting his broad chest.
During a silent moment the throng parted to let the priest skulk through, and, closing, remained mute and admiring the vigorous man who offered himself as target to the terrible power to which half the world was enslaved at that era.
There was no longer mayor, town councilmen or gendarmes, only the Hero of the People, Billet.
"But we have no priest now," said Mayor Longpre.
"We do not want him," replied Billet who had never been in church but twice, for his wedding and his child's baptism. "We will read the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the altar. That is the Creed of Liberty and the Gospel of the Future."
Billet could not read but he had his manifesto by heart. When he had finished and with a noble movement embraced the Law and the Sword by taking the mayor's and Pitou's hands, the multitude appreciated the grandeur of what they were doing in shouting: