"Mistake—how?" asked Quentin, smiling at the young Frenchman's gestures and energy.
"Mon camarade, a man says more when under the influences of eau-de-vie, or champagne, than he ever does under those of vin-ordinaire, cold water, or a bowl of gruel; and, as your remarkably potent rum-and-water has put me in that condition when a man reveals his loves and hates, and, more foolish still, sometimes his private history, I don't care if I tell you how I became a soldier.
"My father," began the garrulous chasseur, "is an officer of the old days of the monarchy, and held his first commission, like the Emperor himself, from Louis XVI., the Most Christian King, and they were brother subalterns in the regiment of La Fere. To the friendship that grew up between them there, the old gentleman owes his brigade and the Grand Cross of the Legion, quite as much as to his own bravery in Germany, Italy, and Flanders. My mother (or she at least whom I have been taught to call my mother, for she is his second wife,) was a widow of rank, who lost her whole possessions in the stormy days of the Revolution. She was without children, and when my father was assisting the Little Corporal to play the devil at Toulon, Arcola, Lodi, Marengo, and elsewhere, she most affectionately took charge of me, and of my education in Paris.
"As we were not rich, it was proposed to make a doctor of me, and so I was duly matriculated at the Ecole de Médecine, and commenced my studies there, not with much enthusiasm or industry either; but in the vague hope, nevertheless, that I might some day cut a figure and have my portrait hung among the full lengths of Ambrose Paré, Maréchal, La Peyronnie, and others in the school.
"I look back with no small repugnance to the daily tasks I performed there, and to the horrors of the dissecting-room, after boyish curiosity grew satiated. My brain became addled by lectures on the maxillary sinus, on diseases of the stomach, of the pylorus, the hepatic and abdominal viscera; elephantiasis, aortic aneurism, the lacteal and glandular system, and Heaven alone knows all what more, till I imagined that I had alternately in my own person every ailment peculiar to man. We had plenty of subjects, for daily the guillotine was slicing away in the Place de la Grève, and I have seen the loveliest women and the noblest men in France laid on those tables to be stripped and dissected by the knife of the demonstrator.
"I was soon voted the worst if not the most stupid student that ever put his foot within the college walls. The professors were in despair. They could make nothing of me; and to muddle my poor brain more, about this time I must needs fall in love. Ah! I perceive that you now become interested. I was not much over seventeen, and my first love——"
"First?" said Quentin.
"Oui—ma foi! I have had a dozen—was Madame Lisette Thiebault, a friend of my mother."
"A widow, of course?"
"Not at all. She was unfortunately the wife of one of our doctors in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine;" replied the étourdi young Frenchman.