"I tell you to take up those bundles of straw, and quickly, too. Do you hear, conscript?"
He was quite an old man, with mustaches and red, bushy whiskers. Zébédé seized one of the latter, but received two blows in the face. Nevertheless, a fist-full of the whisker remained in his grasp, and, as the dispute had attracted a crowd to the spot, the hussar shook his finger, saying:
"You will hear from me to-morrow, conscript."
"Very good," returned Zébédé; "we shall see. You will probably hear from me too, veteran."
He came immediately after to tell me all this, and I, knowing that he had never handled a weapon more warlike than a pickaxe, could not help trembling for him.
"Listen, Zébédé," I said; "all that there now remains for you to do, since you do not want to desert, is to ask pardon of this old fellow; for those veterans all know some fearful tricks of fence which they have brought from Egypt or Spain, or somewhere else. If you wish, I will lend you a crown to pay for a bottle of wine to make up the quarrel."
But he, knitting his brows, would hear none of this.
"Rather than beg his pardon," said he, "I would go and hang myself. I laugh him and his comrades to scorn. If he has tricks of fence, I have a long arm, that will drive my sabre through his bones as easily as his will penetrate my flesh."
The thought of the blows made him insensible to reason; and soon Chazy, the maître d'armes, Corporal Fleury, Furst, and Léger came in. They all said that Zébédé was in the right, and the maître d'armes added that blood alone could wash out the stain of a blow; that the honor of the recruits required Zébédé to fight.
Zébédé answered proudly that the men of Phalsbourg had never feared the sight of a little blood, and that he was ready. Then the maître d'armes went to see our Captain, Florentin, who was one of the most magnificent men imaginable—tall, well-formed, broad-shouldered, with regular features, and the Cross, which the Emperor had himself given him at Eylau. The captain even went further than the maître d'armes; he thought it would set the conscripts a good example, and that if Zébédé refused to fight he would be unworthy to remain in the Third Battalion of the Sixth of the Line.