On approaching the outer palisades, we were received by a guard under arms, and a number of officers, whose grimly bronzed faces and faded uniforms, were visible by the light of a large lantern. Around them hovered a crowd of blacks and mulattoes, armed with muskets, and wearing crossbelts over their sable chests or cotton shirts. Many had also hatchets and sabres.
"Qui vive?" challenged a sentry of the French line.
"A flag of truce," replied Glendonwyn.
"Addressed to whom?"
"Monsieur le Colonel Du Plessis, commandant of La Fleur d'Epée."
"Advance, monsieur l'officier—the colonel is here," replied the sentinel, presenting arms.
"Speak, sir," said a tall, stern officer, whose long grey hair fell in the wavy fashion of the republic over the rolling collar of his plain grey great-coat, which was buttoned up to the throat, where his gilt gorget was suspended by a tricoloured ribbon. "I am he you seek," he added, saluting us.
M. Du Plessis was a solemn and gloomy man; and his story, which we knew well, was a singular one.
In the year of the revolution and fall of the Bastille, he had been a private in one of the battalions of the Régiment de Turenne, but revolted. In a night attack made by the Chevalier Adrien de Losme, with a "handful" of the French guards, on a barricade in the Rue de Clichy, Du Plessis was involved in a deadly mêlée with the royalist troops, whose standard-bearer he encountered hand to hand in the dark, and on the summit of the hastily-constructed barrier, Du Plessis was victor. Thrice he ran the royalist through the body, and as he placed a foot upon the fallen corpse, its face was turned towards him; a ray of light fell on it, and the miserable man discovered that he had slain his—own father!
From that hour he was changed and gloomy. He made a vow that he would die in action. Even as he uttered this vow a shot struck his breast, and he fell. On examining the supposed wound, it was found "that the ball had been stopped," as Dutriel (who told me the anecdote) related, "by a scapular of the Virgin which he wore. The mark of the ball remained on the piece of cloth, but Du Plessis was untouched; and though he ever did his duty as became a soldier, since that night of horror in the Rue de Clichy he had lived with the severity of a monk of La Trappe."