I have been wounded myself so often that I have to stop and think before I can tell you the exact number of times.  I have been hit by musket balls, by pistol bullets, and by bursting shells, besides being pierced by bayonet, lance, sabre, and finally by a brad-awl, which was the most painful of any.  Yet out of all these injuries I have never known the same deadly sickness as came over me when I felt the poor, silent, patient creature, which I had come to love more than anything in the world except my mother and the Emperor, reel and stagger beneath me.  I pulled my second pistol from my holster and fired point-blank between the fellow’s broad shoulders.  He slashed his horse across the flank with his whip, and for a moment I thought that I had missed him.  But then on the green of his chasseur jacket I saw an ever-widening black smudge, and he began to sway in his saddle, very slightly at first, but more and more with every bound, until at last over he went, with his foot caught in the stirrup, and his shoulders thud-thud-thudding along the road, until the drag was too much for the tired horse, and I closed my hand upon the foam-spattered bridle-chain.  As I pulled him up it eased the stirrup leather, and the spurred heel clinked loudly as it fell.

‘Your papers!’ I cried, springing from my saddle.  ‘This instant!’

But even as I said, it, the huddle of the green body and the fantastic sprawl of the limbs in the moonlight told me clearly enough that it was all over with him.  My bullet had passed through his heart, and it was only his own iron will which had held him so long in the saddle.  He had lived hard, this Montluc, and I will do him justice to say that he died hard also.

But it was the papers—­always the papers—­of which I thought.  I opened his tunic and I felt in his shirt.  Then I searched his holsters and his sabre-tasche.  Finally I dragged off his boots, and undid his horse’s girth so as to hunt under the saddle.  There was not a nook or crevice which I did not ransack.  It was useless.  They were not upon him.

When this stunning blow came upon me I could have sat down by the roadside and wept.  Fate seemed to be fighting against me, and that is an enemy from whom even a gallant hussar might not be ashamed to flinch.  I stood with my arm over the neck of my poor wounded Violette, and I tried to think it all out, that I might act in the wisest way.  I was aware that the Emperor had no great respect for my wits, and I longed to show him that he had done me an injustice.  Montluc had not the papers.  And yet Montluc had sacrificed his companions in order to make his escape.  I could make nothing of that.  On the other hand, it was clear that, if he had not got them, one or other of his comrades had.  One of them was certainly dead.  The other I had left fighting with Tremeau, and if he escaped from the old swordsman he had still to pass me.  Clearly, my work lay behind me.