THE CAPTAIN'S VICES*
By FRANCOIS COPPEE
*Translated for Great Short Stories by Mrs. J. L. Meyer.
I
The name of the place where Captain Mercadier (thirty years in the service, twenty-two campaigns, and three wounds) settled when he was retired is of small importance. It was a place similar to all the little cities which strive to acquire, but do not acquire, a branch railway station. As there was no railway station there the natives had but one diversion: they all met on the Place de la Fontaine at the same hour every day to see the diligence roll in to the cracking of the long whip and the jingling of the little bells. The city numbered 3,000 inhabitants (ambitiously called by the statistics "souls"), and it fed its vanity on the fact that it was the county-seat. It possessed ramparts shaded by trees, a pretty river for fishing with the line, and a church of the charming epoch of the flamboyant Gothic, dishonored by a terrible "Stations of the Cross," sent down direct from Saint Sulpice.
Always on Monday the public square was mottled with the great blue and red umbrellas of the market; and the country people came in in carts and berlins. But the rest of the week the village fell back with drowsy delight into the silence and the solitude which endeared it to the sober bourgeoise who made up its 3,000 "souls."
The streets were paved in little patterns, and through the closed windows of the ground floors could be seen bouquets made of the hair of the departed—or of some other hair—and wreaths of orange blossoms on cushions under glass shades. And through the half-glass doors of the gardens passers-by could see statuettes of Napoleon formed of clam-shells. Of course, the principal inn was named "l'Ecu de France." The town registrar was a poet; he rimed acrostics for the ladies of the best society of the place.
Captain Mercadier had chosen that particular village for the frivolous reason that it was his birthplace. In his boisterous youth he had mutilated the advertising signs and chipped splinters out of the porcelain bell-knobs. Despite these potent reasons, he had neither relations nor friends in the city, and his memories of his childhood held nothing but the indignant faces of the tradesmen, who showed him their clenched fists as they screamed and capered on their doorsills; the catechism, which menaced him with hell; a school where he was told that he should die upon the scaffold, and—last memory of all—his departure for the regiment, a departure hastened a trifle by the paternal malediction. For he was no saint, this captain! The record of his career was black with days passed in the guard-house (causes for punishment being absence from roll-call without leave, and orgies after taps). Time and time again he had been stripped of his chevrons (both as corporal and as sergeant), and it had been only by chance—thanks to the broad license of the campaign—that he had won his first epaulette. Stern and bold soldier, he had passed the greater part of his life in Algeria, having enlisted at the time when our men in the ranks wore the high kepi and white cross-belt and carried the heavy cartridge-box. He had had Lamoricière for commandant; the Duc de Nemours (who had been near him when he received his first wound) had decorated him; and while he was sergeant-major old Bugeaud had called him by his given name and pulled his ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el-Kadir; he bore the scars of a yataghan on his neck; carried one bullet in his shoulder and another in his leg; and, despite absinthe, duels, and gambling debts, and the almond-shaped black eyes of the Jewesses, he had forced victory at the point of the bayonet and the sabre, and so won his grade of Captain in the First Regiment of Cuirassiers. Captain Mercadier (thirty years of service, twenty-two campaigns, three wounds) had just been retired, and for the first time drawn his half-pay—not quite two hundred dollars, which, added to the fifty dollars accompanying his cross, placed him in the condition of honorable poverty reserved by the state for the men who have best served her.
The Captain's entrance in his native town was devoid of pomp. He arrived one morning in the imperial of the diligence, chewing the remains of an extinct cigar, and talking and laughing with the driver, to whom during the journey he had narrated the story of how he had passed the Iron Gates. His auditor had cut the narrative by oaths or by gross threats addressed to the straining mare upon the right, but Mercadier was indulgent, and he had told his history to its end.
When the diligence drew into the Place de la Fontaine he flung down an old valise covered by labels representing all the railroads that he had traveled when he changed garrison, and three minutes later the assembled citizens were stupefied by the spectacle of a man wearing the ribbon, standing at the zinc counter of the nearest wine-shop and drinking and cracking jokes with the driver. (The fact of his ribbon would have been exciting had there been nothing else!)