As he glanced at himself in the mirror, the girls giggled again, and their mother said,—
"Silly ones, why do you laugh? Is our new uniform so marvellous a change that you do not recognize Lieutenant Bonaparte?"
"Lieutenant Bonaparte, mamma!" cried fun-loving Laura. "No, no! not that. See! is not Napoleon for all the world like—like Lieutenant Puss-in-Boots?"
Whereupon they laughed yet more merrily, and Napoleon laughed with them.
"My boots are big, indeed," he said; "too big, perhaps; but I hope to grow into them. How was it with Puss-in-Boots, girls? He filled his well at last, did he not? You will be sorry you laughed at me, some day, when I march into your house, a big, fat general. Come, let us go and see Eliza. They may go with me, eh, Madame?"
"Yes; go with the lieutenant, children," said Madame Permon.
So they all went to call on Eliza, at the school of St. Cyr, and you may be sure that she admired her brother, the new lieutenant, boots and all. And as they came home, Napoleon took the little girls into a toy-store, and bought for them a toy-carriage, in which he placed a doll dressed as Puss-in-boots.
"It is the carriage of the Marquis of Carabas, my children," he said, as they went to the Permons' house by the river. "And when I am at Valence, you will look at this, and think again of your friend, Lieutenant Puss-in-Boots."