“Somebody has already undertaken it,”
was the reply. “Go in if you wish to, as
you knew them. You can settle about their funeral
with their friend.”
I went in. The captain and his wife were lying
side by side on a bed, and were covered by a sheet.
I raised it, and saw that the woman had inflicted
a similar wound in her throat to that from which her
husband had died.
At the side of the bed there sat, watching and weeping,
the woman who had been mentioned to me as their best
friend. It was the lancer’s wife.
“Upon my word,” Colonel Laporte said,
“I am old and gouty, my legs are as stiff as
two pieces of wood, and yet if a pretty woman were
to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe
I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a
hoop. I shall die like that; it is in the blood.
I am an old beau, one of the old school, and the sight
of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips of
my toes. There!
“And then, we are all very much alike in France;
we remain cavaliers, cavaliers of love and fortune,
since God has been abolished, whose body-guard we
really were. But nobody will ever get a woman
out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will
remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love
her, and go on committing all kinds of frolics on
her account, as long as there is a France on the map
of Europe, and even if France were to be wiped off
the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.
“When I am in the presence of a woman, of a
pretty woman, I feel capable of anything. By
Jove! When I feel her looks penetrating me, her
confounded looks which set your blood on fire, I should
like to do I don’t know what; to fight a duel,
to have a row, to smash the furniture, in order to
show that I am the strongest, the bravest, the most
daring, and the most devoted of men.
“But I am not the only one, certainly not; the
whole French army is like me, that I will swear to
you. From the common soldier to the general, we
all go forward, and to the very end, when there is
a woman in the case, a pretty woman. Remember
what Joan of Arc made us do formerly! Come, I
will make a bet that if a pretty woman had taken command
of the army on the eve of Sedan, when Marshal Mac-Mahon
was wounded, we should have broken through the Prussian
lines, by Jove! and have had a drink out of their
guns.
“It was not Trochu, but Saint-Genevieve, who
was required in Paris, and I remember a little anecdote
of the war which proves that we are capable of everything
in the presence of a woman.
“I was a captain, a simple captain, at the time,
and I was in command of a detachment of scouts, who
were retreating through a district which swarmed with
Prussians. We were surrounded, pursued, tired
out, and half dead with fatigue and hunger, and by
the next day we were bound to reach Bar-sur-Tain,
otherwise we should be done for, cut off from the main
body and killed. I do not know how we managed
to escape so far. However, we had ten leagues
to go during the night, ten leagues through the snow,
and with empty stomachs, and I thought to myself:
