And Cigarette, having pronounced her defense and her eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in their lighted tent.
“C'est Cigarette!” said the Chef d'Escadron, with a shrug of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities.
“A strange little Amazon!” said their guest. “Is she in love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with his name?”
The Major shrugged his shoulders.
“I don't know that, monsieur,” answered one. “She will defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face most soundly. Cigarette whirls about like a little paper windmill, just as the breeze blows; but, as the windmill never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the Tricolor.”
Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own thoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this Chasseur's fortunes, he should have brought in the name he loved so well—the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in Europe—into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp dinner.
Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his swarthy features; only now he opened his lips for a few brief words:
“Mon cher Duc, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of her pity. The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an outlaw when he came to us. He fights well—it is often a blackguard's virtue!”
His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience and aversion at the introduction of his sister's name into the discussion made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it die out forgotten.
Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper! If Cigarette had been of his own sex he could have dashed the white teeth down her throat for having spoken of the two in one breath.