My mind was too full of its own absorbing interests to make me care to visit the theatre; and having dined in a café on the Boulevard, I turned towards the general's quarters in the hope of finding him arrived. As I entered the Rue de Rohan, I was surprised at a crowd collected about the door, watching the details of packing a travelling carriage which stood before it. A heavy fourgon, loaded with military chests and boxes, seemed also to attract their attention, and call forth many a surmise as to its destination.
“Le Petit Caporal has something in his head, depend upon it,” said a thin, dark-whiskered fellow with a wooden leg, whose air and gesture bespoke the old soldier; “the staff never move off, extra post, without a good reason for it.”
“It is the English are about to catch it this time,” said a miserable-looking, decrepit creature, who was occupied in roasting chestnuts over an open stove. “Hot, all hot! messieurs et mesdames! real 'marrons de Nancy,'—the true and only veritable chestnuts with a truffle flavor. Sacristi! now the sea-wolves will meet their match! It is such brave fellows as you, monsieur le grenadier, can make them tremble.”
The old pensioner smoothed down his mustache, and made no reply.
“The English, indeed!” said a fat, ruddy-faced woman, with a slight line of dark beard on her upper lip. “My husband 's a pioneer in the Twenty-second, and says they're nothing better than poltroons. How we made them run at Arcole! Wasn't it Arcole?” said she, as a buzz of laughter ran through the crowd.
“Tonnerre de guerre” cried the little man, “if I was at them!”
A loud burst of merriment met this warlike speech; while the maimed soldier, apparently pleased with the creature's courage, smiled blandly on him as he said, “Let me have two sous' worth of your chestnuts.”
Leaving the party to their discussion, I now entered the house, and edging my way upstairs between trunks and packing-cases, arrived at the drawing-room. The general had just come in; he had been the whole morning at Court, and was eating a hurried dinner in order to return to the Tuileries for the evening reception. Although his manner towards me was kind and cordial in the extreme, I thought he looked agitated and even depressed, and seemed much older and more broken than before.
“You see, Burke, you 'll have little time to enjoy Paris gayeties; we leave to-morrow.”
“Indeed, sir! So soon?”