“Does the smell of the pipe annoy you?” he said, placing the dilapidated straw-bottomed chair for his lawyer.
“But, Colonel, you are dreadfully uncomfortable here!”
The speech was wrung from Derville by the distrust natural to lawyers, and the deplorable experience which they derive early in life from the appalling and obscure tragedies at which they look on.
“Here,” said he to himself, “is a man who has of course spent my money in satisfying a trooper’s three theological virtues—play, wine, and women!”
“To be sure, monsieur, we are not distinguished for luxury here. It is a camp lodging, tempered by friendship, but——” And the soldier shot a deep glance at the man of law—“I have done no one wrong, I have never turned my back on anybody, and I sleep in peace.”
Derville reflected that there would be some want of delicacy in asking his client to account for the sums of money he had advanced, so he merely said:
“But why would you not come to Paris, where you might have lived as cheaply as you do here, but where you would have been better lodged?”
“Why,” replied the Colonel, “the good folks with whom I am living had taken me in and fed me gratis for a year. How could I leave them just when I had a little money? Besides, the father of those three pickles is an old Egyptian—”
“An Egyptian!”
“We give that name to the troopers who came back from the expedition into Egypt, of which I was one. Not merely are all who get back brothers; Vergniaud was in my regiment. We have shared a draught of water in the desert; and besides, I have not yet finished teaching his brats to read.”