"'You'll have two days more for insulting me.'
"The next day I tell what's happened to my Lieutenant, and he says that he will speak to the Hussar officer; but my Lieutenant comes back, and he says that the officer doesn't mind cancelling my punishment, but that the Corporal insists on letting his two days stand as they are, and that he won't cancel them. All that makes a shindy between the younger officers of our regiment and those of the Hussars, and the General hears of it, because two of them officers actually applied for leave to fight a duel. The General sends for me—he was just mad because during the past fortnight two other barns had been set on fire—and he tells me I am a scoundrel to have smoked in the barn; but I tell him how things happened, and that 'twas the Corporal himself who'd been smoking. The Colonel of the Hussars, who just happened to be coming for some report to the General, says:
"'Ah, that's the swine who nearly set a barn on fire last night, and now he tries to take away the character of one of my Corporals!'
"This makes the General quite mad, and he gives me fifteen days' prison. Yes, old chap, fifteen days' prison, when I'd done nothing. It fairly turned my blood, and I went away hardly knowing what I was doing. I passed a pub and went in. I called for absinthe and brandy and the Lord knows what else. The more I drunk the more I wanted, and I was that mad that when two Hussars walked into the pub I sprang on them, and if others hadn't come to their rescue 'twould have been a case of murder, I think. They had to tie me up, and by Gad it took eight of them to do it. To my first punishment, fifteen days' prison, and fifteen days' solitary confinement in cells, were added, and when, two days later, the manœuvres ended, I was marched back to barracks—a prisoner. Of course any question of promotion was at an end—to think of it after I had worked so hard to become a Corporal! When I came out of prison I no longer cared a b—— d—— what happened to me. I drank whenever I had money, and if I hadn't, Decle, my boy, I would have shot myself. How I have got through these last three years I don't know. They threatened more than once to send me to Biribi. What did I care? If it hadn't been for our late Colonel—he understood me, that man—I should have done something desperate; but since he is dead—ah, malheur! The new Colonel calls me a disgrace to the regiment, and a disgrace to the French army: but what do I care? But then when a chap like our doctor doesn't feel ashamed to hold out his hand to me—well, my boy, it goes to my heart. You, too, old Decle, although we are both mere troopers, you are a gentleman, while I am but a labourer and a low blackguardly drunkard; and yet you treat me as a friend. Give me your hand, old boy."
I gave it to him, and he pressed it between his two enormous palms, and then, in a husky voice, he added,
"Ah! it's long since I have felt so happy," and with the back of his hand he wiped off a tear.
"Forgive me, old chap," he said, "I know I'm making a fool of myself!"
For answer I could only squeeze his hand, and I turned round to hide a tear of my own—a tear of pity for the poor fellow whose feelings I could now understand so well.
During the long days we spent together Piatte delighted to speak of his home; he belonged to the country, where he drove a diligence: he loved horses and animals, and he was still full of old and quaint superstitions. "I was seventeen," he once said to me, "when I drove a coach for the first time, and I shall never forget that night. I had never driven the coach except to bring it round from the stables to the inn, when one night the governor orders the diligence to be got ready for a foreign gentleman who wanted to catch a train twenty miles from our place. All the other carriages were out, and the diligence alone was available. When Jean-Paul, the usual driver, hears of it he says that he will not drive it for all the money in the world, it being a Friday night in the month of January. 'Why?' I asked him. He told me that at one place where the road meets the Strasbourg road there was a ghost which always came out from behind a tree when the diligence passed along at night on a Friday in January: 'his grandfather, his father, and him too had seen it, and he did not want to see it no more.' I didn't believe much in ghosts, so I offered to drive, and my governor, to whom the coach belonged, let me go. The horses were fresh, the carriage light, and we were rattling along at a good pace when all of a sudden I see a woman dressed in white jump from behind a tree and stand in the middle of the road. 'Hi! hi! look out!' I shout, but she did not seem to heed me, and before I could pull up the leaders were on her. They shied and reared, but there she rises between the two of them and seems to jump over the wheelers, and for a second or two she flitters in front of me like a huge bat. As I looked round I saw that we were just at the spot which Jean-Paul had told me was haunted. I felt my heart in my mouth, and lashing the horses put them at a gallop—and they didn't want no urging either; but the ghost seemed to fly in the air alongside the coach for a distance of about a hundred yards, when she disappeared in a bush."
I told Piatte that it was the effect of his imagination, but he was positive about it; according to him the ghost had the face of a young girl with very dark hair, and was draped in white garments with a kind of hood over her head.