“Just as you please,” said the footman, emerging with two brimming pewter measures, “but none the less true. M. Pédelaborde’s nephew, who taught the coup to M. Hector, told M. Alain de Moulny, long after the affair, how cleverly he had been grassed. It was at the Hôtel de Moulny, my crony Lacroix, M. Alain’s valet, was waiting in the ante-room and listened at the door. Money passed, Lacroix says. M. Alain de Moulny paid Pédelaborde handsomely not to tell.”
“That is a story one doesn’t like the stink of,” said Auguste, making a wry mouth, draining his measure, handing it back to the silk-calved one, and spitting in the dust. “But the knowing fellow who taught M. Hector the dirty dodge and blows the gaff for hush-money, that is a rank polecat, my word!”
A crude pronouncement with which the reader may possibly be inclined to agree.
XI
The months went by. Hector ended his course at the School of Technical Military Instruction with honors, and his examiners, in recognition of the gift for languages, the bent for Science, the administrative and organizing capacities that were distinctive of this student, transferred him, with another equally promising youth, not to the Academy of Ways, Works, and Transport, where the embryo artillery and engineer officers of the School of Technical Military Instruction were usually ground and polished, but to the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff. An annual bounty tacked to the tail of the certificate relieved that pressing necessity for pocket-money. Redskin, with fewer anxieties upon his mind, could draw breath.
The Training Institute for Officers of the Staff was the School of Technical Military Instruction all over again, but upon a hugely magnified scale. To mention the School was the unpardonable sin: you spent the first term in laboriously unlearning everything that had been taught you there. On being admitted to the small gate adjacent to the large ones of wrought and gilded iron, you beheld the façade of the Institute, its great portico crowned with a triangular pediment supported upon stately pillars, upon which was sculptured an emblematical bas-relief of France, seated on a trophy of conquered cannon, instructing her sons in the military sciences, and distributing among them weapons of war. Following your guide, you shortly afterwards discovered two large yards full of young men in unbuttoned uniforms, supporting on their knees drawing-boards with squares of cartridge paper pinned upon them, upon which they were busily delineating the various architectural features of the buildings of the Institute, while a Colonel of the Corps of Instructors sternly or blandly surveyed the scene. Within the Institute, studies in Mathematics, Trigonometry and Topography, Cosmography, Geography, Chemistry, Artillery, Field Fortifications, Permanent Fortifications, Assault and Defense, Plans, Military Administration, Military Maneuvers, French, English, and German Literature, Fencing, Swimming, and Horsemanship in all its branches were thoroughly and comprehensively taught. And once a quarter the pupil-basket was picked over by skilled hands; and worthy young men, who were eminently fitted to serve their country in the inferior capacity as regimental officers, but did not possess the qualities necessary for the making of Officers of the Staff, were, at that little gate by the side of the great gilded iron ones, blandly shown out.
For, sane even in her maddest hour, France has never—under every conceivable political condition, in every imaginable national crisis, and under whatever government—Monarchical, Imperial, or Republican, that may for the time being have got the upper hand—ceased laboring to insure the supply to her Army, constantly renewed, of officers competent to command armies, of scientists skilled in the innumerable moves of the Great Game of War. Nor have other nations, Continental or insular, ever failed to profit by France’s example, and follow France’s lead.
The Marshal’s son was not dismissed by that dreaded little exit. The fine flower of Young France grew in the neat parterres behind those lofty gilded railings. Sous-lieutenant Hector Dunoisse found many intellectual superiors among his comrades, whose society stimulated him to greater efforts. He worked, and presently began to win distinction; passed, with a specially-endorsed certificate, his examinations in the branches of study already enumerated and a few more; served for three months as Supernumerary-Assistant-Adjutant with an Artillery Regiment at Nancy; did duty for a corresponding period in the same capacity at Belfort with a corps of Engineers; and then received his appointment as Assistant-Adjutant to the 33rd Regiment of Chasseurs d’Afrique, quartered at Blidah.
Money would not be needed to make life tolerable at Blidah, where mettlesome Arab horses could be bought by Chasseurs d’Afrique at reasonable prices, and the mastic and the thin Dalmatian wine were excellent and cheap. Algerian cigars and pipe-tobacco were obtainable at the outlay of a few coppers; and from every thicket of dwarf oak or alfa-grass, hares started out before the sportsman’s gun; and partridges and Carthage hens were as plentiful as sparrows in Paris.