This thought touched me, and I paid my compliments on his having become my neighbor with a warmth which opened his heart.
“Faith! you seem to me to have the look of a good Christian,” said he in a voice of soldierlike cordiality, and shaking me by the hand. “I do not like those people who look on a landing-place as a frontier line, and treat their neighbors as if they were Cossacks. When men snuff the same air, and speak the same lingo, they are not meant to turn their backs to each other. Sit down there, neighbor; I don’t mean to order you; only take care of the stool; it has but three legs, and we must put good-will in place of the fourth.”
“It seems that that is a treasure which there is no want of here,” I observed.
“Good-will!” repeated Chaufour; “that is all my mother left me, and I take it no son has received a better inheritance. Therefore they used to call me Monsieur Content in the batteries.”
“You are a soldier, then?”
“I served in the Third Artillery under the Republic, and afterward in the Guard, through all the commotions. I was at Jemappes and at Waterloo; so I was at the christening and at the burial of our glory, as one may say!”
I looked at him with astonishment.
“And how old were you then, at Jemappes?” asked I.
“Somewhere about fifteen,” said he.
“How came you to think of being a soldier so early?”