But, his superior didn't suffer fools or slackers gladly, and more than one promising and well-connected young officer had had his head lopped off for less. Now, what to do, what to do? Hainaut dithered, all the while in an outward pose of a man with few cares, but for this mere trifle.

Jumped-up, foreign farm-hand! Clerk de Gougne silently sneered as he gathered up his traps; can't even speak good French, he circumspectly scoffed with a Parisian's disdain for anything provincial, or anyone born outside La Belle France.

Jules Hainaut no longer looked it, but he had been born a farmboy, in the Austrian Netherlands, his parents the sketchiest sort of "outlander" French. He'd fled potato-grubbing early, had gone to sea at fourteen, still nigh-illiterate, and had drifted into the old Royal French Navy just before the start of the Revolution.

Just a lowly matelot with grandiose dreams of being somebody or something, some day, he'd seen quickly how the prevailing winds stood, and had gladly (if not wholeheartedly) embraced Republicanism and the Jacobism of the sans culottes as a way to advance himself. He bought a tricolour revolutionary's cockade and red-wool tassel cap, and had worn them with outward pride, had shouted "Down with the Aristos" the loudest, and had ridden the coat-tails of the Terror, helping to purge the navy of Royalists and aristocrats, earning a share of the loot taken from them, moving up in rank, in "dead men's shoes." For once, his lack of education, his humble beginnings, and his outlandness had worked for him, for he was held up as a shining example of how the ideals of the Revolution would spread all round the world and conquer the old order.

Most of the rhetoric was Greek to Hainaut, just loud twaddle to be tolerated-but it paid well to listen and cheer. And the raids and arrests, as a "virtuous" commoner armed to the teeth and given the awesome power of weaponry over the rich, the titled, and their minions and lick-spittle servants, was a heady thing, indeed. And the cheers!