"Ah! /le pauvre petit mignon/,—no!" (/petit/, indeed! this little darling was seventeen hands high at the very least) "no, Monsieur: it is but a young creature this; his grandfather served me well!"
"I need not ask you, Monsieur, if you have borne arms: the soldier is stamped upon you!"
"Sir, you flatter me highly!" said the old gentleman, blushing to the very tip of his long lean ears, and bowing as low as if I had called him a Conde. "I have followed the profession of arms for more than fifty years."
"Fifty years! 'tis a long time."
"A long time," rejoined my companion, "a long time to look back upon with regret."
"Regret! by Heaven, I should think the remembrance of fifty years' excitement and glory would be a remembrance of triumph."
The old man turned round on his saddle, and looked at me for some moments very wistfully. "You are young, Sir," he said, "and at your years I should have thought with you; but—" (then abruptly changing his voice, he continued)—"Triumph, did you say? Sir, I have had three sons: they are dead; they died in battle; I did not weep; I did not shed a tear, Sir,—not a tear! But I will tell you when I did weep. I came back, an old man, to the home I had left as a young one. I saw the country a desert. I saw that the /noblesse/ had become tyrants; the peasants had become slaves,—such slaves,—savage from despair,—even when they were most gay, most fearfully gay, from constitution. Sir, I saw the priest rack and grind, and the seigneur exact and pillage, and the tax-gatherer squeeze out the little the other oppressors had left; anger, discontent, wretchedness, famine, a terrible separation between one order of people and another; an incredible indifference to the miseries their despotism caused on the part of the aristocracy; a sullen and vindictive hatred for the perpetration of those miseries on the part of the people; all places sold—even all honours priced—at the court, which was become a public market, a province of peasants, of living men bartered for a few livres, and literally passed from one hand to another, to be squeezed and drained anew by each new possessor: in a word, Sir, an abandoned court; an unredeemed /noblesse/,—unredeemed, Sir, by a single benefit which, in other countries, even the most feudal, the vassal obtains from the master; a peasantry famished; a nation loaded with debt which it sought to pay by tears,—these are what I saw,—these are the consequences of that heartless and miserable vanity from which arose wars neither useful nor honourable,—these are the real components of that /triumph/, as you term it, which you wonder that I regret."
Now, although it was impossible to live at the court of Louis XIV. in his latter days, and not feel, from the general discontent that prevailed even there, what a dark truth the old soldier's speech contained, yet I was somewhat surprised by an enthusiasm so little military in a person whose bearing and air were so conspicuously martial.
"You draw a melancholy picture," said I; "and the wretched state of culture which the lands that we now pass through exhibit is a witness how little exaggeration there is in your colouring. However, these are but the ordinary evils of war; and, if your country endures them, do not forget that she has also inflicted them. Remember what France did to Holland, and own that it is but a retribution that France should now find that the injury we do to others is (among nations as well as individuals) injury to ourselves."
My old Frenchman curled his mustaches with the finger and thumb of his left hand: this was rather too subtile a distinction for him.