Billet stepped forward, and interposed between the soldiers and the mob and the schoolboys.
"The old gentleman is right," he said. "The youngsters are a sacred trust. Let men go and fight and get knocked over, that is their duty, but children are the seed for the future."
"Who grumbles?" demanded the farmer; "I am sure it is not a father. Now, I am a father; I have had two men killed in my arms this last night; it is their blood on my breast--see!"
He showed the stains to the assemblage with a grand gesture electrifying all.
"Yesterday, I was fighting at the Palais Royale and in the Tuileries Garden," resumed the farmer; "and this lad fought by my side; but then he has no father or mother: and besides he is almost a man grown."
"I shall be fighting again to-day; but I do not want anybody to say the Parisians could not thrash the enemy until they brought the children to help them."
"The man's right," chorussed the soldiers and women. "No children in the fighting. Keep them in."
"Oh, thank you, sir," said the head master to Billet, trying to shake hands with him through the bars.
"And above all take good care of Gilbert," said the latter.
"Keep me in? I tell you they shall not," cried the boy, livid with anger as he struggled in the grasp of the school servants.
"Let me go in, and I undertake to quiet him."
The crowd divided and let the farmer and Pitou go into the schoolyard. Already three or four French Guards and a dozen other soldiers instinctively stood sentry at the gates and prevented the young insurgents from bolting out.
Billet went straight up to Sebastian and taking his fine white hands in his large, horny ones, said:
"Sebastian, do you not know Farmer Billet, who farms your father's own land?"
Pitou threw himself on the other's neck, blubbering with joy.
"If they have taken away your father, I will bring him back. I, and the rest of us. Why not? yesterday we had a turn-up with the Austrians and we saw the flat of their backs."
"In token of which here is a cartridge-box one of them has no farther use for," added Ange.
"Will we not liberate his father?" cried Billet to the mob, who shouted an assent.
"But my father is in the Bastile," said Sebastian, shaking his head in melancholy. "None can take the Bastile."