I was betrayed!
Mohammed sank down, uttering a plaintive moan. For my own part I thought of my uncle's misfortune. Was it fate?
However, my uncle is not the only man who comes from Marseilles; I also come from that city, and although I am merely his nephew, I have at times enough of his hot disposition to feel as he felt after similar strokes of fate. Having been drawn into his irregular orbit, passing through the same phases as he passed through, I must expect that nothing will ever happen to me in the same way as it would happen to others, himself excepted. Thus the similarity of our adventures—the drum-major in my case taking the place of my uncle's Jean Bonaffé,—ought not to have surprised me; it should have been foreseen like a philosophical contingency previously inscribed in the book of destiny. And, indeed, to tell the truth, I should have considered the slightest departure from the precise law of fate illogical.
However, I was either in a bad disposition of mind or I had been too suddenly and speedily awakened from the presumptuous quietude into which I had sunk, for I will admit to you that on thinking over my case, I experienced at the moment a singular feeling of astonishment.
Horns are like teeth, a witty woman once said: they hurt while they are coming, but afterwards one manages to put up with them!
True as this remark of an experienced person may be, yet having my own ideas as to these vain appendages which I could not prevent from sprouting; and being, moreover, sufficiently provided with proofs which I had duly weighed, my first idea was to dart head first athwart this intrigue in which my dishonour was a certainty. Leaving Mohammed upon the divan where he had stranded, I hastened by way of the stairs to the guilty creature's room.
I softly opened the closed door, stepped gently over the carpet, and approached her from behind in time to catch her just as she had one hand on her heart and the other on her lips.
She gave a little shriek, while the drum-major, on seeing me appear so suddenly, made a gesture of despair. Then he drew back with such haste that his plume caught against the wall above the window, with the result that his bearskin was knocked off, and turning a sommersault fell into the courtyard.
Zouhra thereupon gave another shriek.
All this had occurred with the rapidity of a flash of lightning. My rival, closing his window, had disappeared like a jack-in-the-box.