His eager, piercing eye strove to detect the secrets of that
impenetrable face, which never changed from the vacant, torpid
expression in which a peasant when doing nothing wraps himself.

"From the country of the Gars," replied the man, without showing any
uneasiness.

"Your name?"

"Marche-a-Terre."

"Why do you call yourself by your Chouan name in defiance of the law?"

Marche-a-Terre, to use the name he gave to himself, looked at the
commandant with so genuine an air of stupidity that the soldier
believed the man had not understood him.

"Do you belong to the recruits from Fougeres?"

To this inquiry Marche-a-Terre replied by the bucolic "I don't know,"
the hopeless imbecility of which puts an end to all inquiry. He seated
himself by the roadside, drew from his smock a few pieces of thin,
black buckwheat-bread,--a national delicacy, the dismal delights of
which none but a Breton can understand,--and began to eat with stolid
indifference. There seemed such a total absence of all human
intelligence about the man that the officers compared him in turn to
the cattle browsing in the valley pastures, to the savages of America,
or the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope. Deceived by
his behavior, the commandant himself was about to turn a deaf ear to
his own misgivings, when, casting a last prudence glance on the man