"If you are wise," he added, with his mouth still half full, "you will get to Paris the best and quickest way you can, and hope that your friend will find his way there also! Sapristi, it is not likely that either he or you or any of us will get much farther than this. Listen—is that the Cossacks already? Curse them, I must sleep or go mad!"
Fagged, dazed, starved, desperate, the unfortunate rear-guard, led by their indomitable chief, straggled forward. Dogged by hordes of pitiless Cossacks they contrived eventually to reach the river Niemen, and to cross into safety, the last survivors of Napoleon's army; their miserable story is well known and need not be recapitulated.
Louise seemed to bear a charmed life. Though, believing that Henri d'Estreville was among the large majority of the Grande Armée lying beneath the snows of Russia, she would gladly have remained, like her lover, among the ten who stayed behind rather than be the one who escaped—for of Napoleon's half million of men scarcely a tithe returned to their homes—yet Louise saw her companions fall around her and never a bullet touched her or a sword or a spear grazed her.
"You and I are wonders, Prevost," said her colonel. "Are we preserved for great military careers, think you? Nom d'un Maréchal, I think I could be another Ney if I had the opportunity! Sapristi, he is splendid!"
"As for me, I have done with war," Louise sighed. "My days of fighting are over."
"Why, you are but a lad—a conscript of 1812; the year is only now ending and you wear a captain's epaulettes! Nonsense, my son, go home and rest and dream of glory; you will tell a different tale when you have recovered."
Then Louise walked one day into her father's salon while the old man, with Marie, sat and listened as young Havet read out Napoleon's latest bulletin. The Emperor had been in Paris for some little while, having deserted his army, and was already busy with his new project of raising 300,000 men, in order to regain the prestige he had undoubtedly lost in the disastrous Moscow campaign.
"Stop, Havet, who is this that enters without knocking?" exclaimed old Dupré angrily; his temper had not improved of late, owing to the reverses of the French arms and the absence of news of Louise, as to whose safety neither his heart nor his conscience was at rest. Marie uttered a cry of delight. "Father, it is Louise!" she screamed. "Louise—sister. Oh, how thin, how worn, how——"
The sisters embraced one another warmly; old Dupré held his daughter to his heart, endeavouring, after his manner, to suppress every sign of emotion. His arms came in contact with her epaulettes. "Why," he cried, "Marie, Havet, see what is here, the epaulettes of an officer; Louise, you have won promotion—glory—is it not so?"
"I received a commission; what glory can any one claim—on our side—and such a war! There must be officers, nine in ten were killed; do not talk of the war, my father; are you well?"