Thanks to my father, the two officers had not long to wait for their liberty: they were exchanged for two French officers of a similar rank. They took leave of the officers' quarters with many expressions of gratitude, and one of them, at any rate, did not lose time in giving proof of this to my father.
A week or so after their departure, an officer came under a flag of truce to the French camp, and, asking to speak with my father, handed him the pistols he had mourned for so long. They had been carried to General Kerpen himself, who, upon the request of the officer whom my father had wounded and taken prisoner, returned them to him with a charming letter. The next day but one my father received the following letter from this officer:—
"MONSIEUR LE GÉNÉRAL,—I hope you have received your pistols by the officer under flag of truce, who left here the day before yesterday; Lieutenant-General Baron de Kerpen has sent them you. I received my cloak, for which I have to thank you, as well as for many other kindnesses you have shown me. Be assured, General, that my gratitude is beyond words, and that my greatest wish is to be able to prove it. My wounds are beginning to heal, and the fever has abated.
"We hear the strongest rumours of peace. I hope as soon as it is concluded that I shall be able to come and greet you before you leave these parts. Frossart,[3] who has lost his heart to you and to General Joubert, charges me with a thousand messages for you both.
"Believe me, Monsieur le Général, with sincerest regards, your very obedient servant,
HAT DE LEVIS, Captain.
"LIENTZ, 20th April 1797."
And that was how my father once more got possession of the famous pistols, the loss of which he had deplored so deeply.
I hope my reader will forgive me these details. Alas! in the rapid movement which carries us along through the time of revolutions, our manners change, become blurred and are forgotten, to be replaced in their turn by other manners as variable as their predecessors. The French Revolution stamped a peculiar seal upon our army; when I come across it I treasure up the impression as one would that of a precious medal fast being obliterated by rust; anxious to make its worth known to one's contemporaries, and to hand down its characteristics to posterity.
And, moreover, we shall misjudge all these men of the Republic if we judge them only by those who survived the Republic and lived on into the period of the Empire. The Empire was an epoch of rude pressure, and the Emperor Napoleon was a rough coiner of new metal. He wanted all money to be stamped with his own image, and all bronze to be smelted in his own furnace; even as he himself had, in some measure, set an example in the transformation of his own character. No one resembled First Consul Bonaparte less than the Emperor Napoleon, the conqueror of Arcole less than the conquered of Waterloo.
Thus the men we must look to to form our ideas of Republican manners are those who by a premature death escaped the birth of the Empire: such men as Marceau, Hoche, Desaix, Kléber, and my father.
Born with the Republic, these men died with her: they knew no change, not even in the cut of the clothes beneath which beat their loyal, brave Republican hearts.
My father, Hoche, and Marceau were all once gathered round the same table: all of them were commanders-in-chief; my father, who was but thirty-one, was the oldest among them. The other two were twenty-four and twenty-six years of age. Their united ages only came to eighty-one. What a promising future seemed before them! But a bullet killed one of them, and the other two were poisoned.