I do not assert that my mother and I were Bonapartists, but we had been labelled such by other people.
We Bonapartists! It was a strange idea. Bonaparte had disgraced, exiled, and ruined us; Napoleon had forgotten, disowned, and left us to starve; and they dubbed us Bonapartists!
The feelings which made me resent this appellation, on behalf of my mother and myself, were so hearty, that whenever any children called me a Bonapartist as we met in the streets, I would throw off my cap and my jacket and, considering myself insulted, instantly demand reparation.
If the offender were of a size to offer it me, satisfaction was given, sometimes too satisfactorily; but it did not matter, for if that happened I began again the next day.
The persistency with which people called us Bonapartists made my mother very uneasy on two accounts: first, because it earned me so many blows; I had never come home so often with a bleeding nose or black eye as since the Restoration; and, secondly, because she detected, underlying this accusation, a feeling of hatred, or rather of jealousy, which would cause her to lose her tobacco-shop license: they would certainly not fail to take it away from her if the charge of Bonapartism were believed.
[CHAPTER II]
The single-barrelled gun—Quiot Biche—Biche and Boudoux compared—I become a poacher—It is proposed to issue a writ against me—Madame Darcourt as plenipotentiary—How it happened that Creton's writ caused me no bother.