After a while the mother relented, but said she would not admit me to the same position in her esteem again, unless I consented to accept the penance she would impose on me. The penance was never to smoke again. I promised. This was when the wreck of our army was being re-formed at Paris, under Louis XVIII., and the allies who had violated our capital were beginning to get confident on the news which each ship conveyed from St. Helena of the hastening end of the Man whom Sir Lowe was doing to death. There was no chance of promotion for us if he did not come back; for the soldiers who loved Him, his death would indeed be the setting of the sun of Austerlitz. I had long given up the expectation of that marshal's bâton which every conscript fancies he carries in his knapsack; but still I had the conviction that some chance of distinction would present itself, even under the pacific Restoration, that might lead me to a rank sufficient to maintain my beloved Caroline in comfort as my wife. My regiment was ordered to Metz. The night I parted from her I confided to her ear the idea that was before my mind, and she looked such a cheerful, hope-inspiring look from her large liquid eyes into mine as would have put fire into a breast of stone. It was the pure lustre of a fresh innocent love, and as earnest that I accepted it as sacred, I gave her my first and last kiss of holy affection. Her mother reminded me at the door of the promise I had made about smoking, and gave me a letter of introduction to a cousin of hers who was an officer in the garrison to which we were ordered. This cousin, as I learned from a comrade who knew him, was of a haughty, overbearing temper, and I was in no hurry to hand him my credentials. About a week after my arrival I was strolling about the fortification in the cool breezy twilight of a sultry day, thinking of my future and of my Caroline, and looking up to the stars in the mood of the poet, to whom the lover is so like. I tried to shape out, in the light clouds that were flitting across the heavens in white flakes, some clue to my fortune. There that pale star, which is so small and distant to-night, but will go on steadily increasing in brightness and size until it attains its zenith, is the star of my destiny. At the instant I gazed on it a wanton scud shut it out from view; I tried to laugh, but I couldn't help feeling as if it were a presentiment of coming gloom. Then I turned towards a bank of cloud rising fantastically on the edge of the far blue horizon, and in fancy pictured to myself that a pair of jagged peaks projecting from its surface were the epaulettes of a general which awaited me; and, still looking, until my eyes had almost got as visionary as my mind, I framed out of a loose irregular mass of fleecy vapour the beamy figure of a woman, whom I had persuaded my senses into identifying as the genius of glory.
'"It is our Napoleon who comes back to France," said I; "the soldier will have his meat to carve again."
'At the moment a tall figure passed, and recalled me from my dreaming. I walked on, but somehow I was melancholic. I couldn't shake off the impression which that star, blotted out of sight as I looked, had made on my mind. I put my hand in the pocket of my uniform and involuntarily took something out of it. It was my cigar-case. Involuntarily still, I opened it—there was one cigar left. I was depressed in spirits, thinking sadly—and smoking, you know, kills thought.
'The bribe was strong. I forgot my promise to Caroline's mother, or encouraged myself to look upon it as a mere puerile engagement to humour a woman's whim, and lit the cigar. Scarcely did the red fire take at its end, and the first puff of smoke escape from my lips, when it was pulled out of my mouth and cast on the ground, and a tall man stood frowning before me, as well as I could distinguish in the dim light. My hand immediately flew to my sword-hilt, and I put myself in an attitude of defence.
'"How dare you smoke here? don't you know the magazine is beside you?" said the stranger, in a harsh voice.
'"I did not know it," I answered; "nor will I allow any fellow to make the fact known to me in that brutal manner."
'"Fellow!" and the stranger laughed; "ma foi, that's amusing; and the cockchafer has his hand on his butter-blade. Is your honour wounded, my gallant sir?"
'"Your body will be wounded shortly if you don't endeavour to civilize your tongue," I answered, enraged.
'"I positively think," said he, coolly twirling his moustaches, "that the Gascon would fight. Does your fancy run on being impaled like a frog? If so, follow me, Sir Braggart," and he moved off.
'I followed, wrath boiling in every vein. He stopped when he came to an angle in the works, totally secure from observation from any side. The moon burst out in full splendour; he cast a look upward, made a jesting remark on the politeness of the higher powers in lighting folk to kingdom come; and, throwing off his cloak, I discovered him to be a staff-officer of rank by the uniform underneath.