The next day, at dawn, we reached Béthune, an ugly little fortified town, where you would say that the ramparts, contracting their circle, had squeezed the houses one on top of another. Everything there was in confusion; there had just been an alarm. The inhabitants were beginning to draw in the white flags from the windows; and to sew the tricolours together in their houses. The drums were beating the call to arms; the trumpets were sounding “to horse,” by order of the Duke of Berry. The long Picardy carts were carrying the Swiss Hundred and their baggage; the cannon of the Body-guard hastening to the ramparts, the princes’ carriages, the squadrons of the Red Companies falling in, were blocking up the town. The sight of the Royal Dragoons and the Musketeers made me forget my old travelling companion. I joined my company, and in the crowd I lost the little cart and its poor occupants. To my great regret, it was for ever that I lost them.
It was the first time in my life that I read the inmost depths of a real soldier’s heart. This meeting revealed to me a kind of human nature unknown to me, and which the country knows little and does not treat well; I placed it thenceforward very high in my esteem. I have often since then sought around me some man like that one, capable of that complete and unheeding self-sacrifice. Now, during the fourteen years that I have lived in the army, it is in it alone, and above all in the poor and despised ranks of the infantry, that I have met these men of antique mould, carrying the sentiment of duty to its final consequences, feeling neither remorse for having obeyed nor shame for being poor, simple in customs and in speech, proud of their country’s glory and heedless of their own, gladly shutting themselves up in their obscurity, and sharing with the unfortunate the black bread which they pay for with their blood.
I was long ignorant of what had become of this poor major, especially as he had not told me his name and I had not asked it. One day, however, at the coffee-house, in 1825, I think, an old infantry captain of the line to whom I described him, whilst waiting for parade, said to me:
“Oh! by heaven, my dear fellow, I knew him, poor devil! He was a fine man; he was ‛put down’ by a bullet at Waterloo. He had, indeed, left with the baggage a kind of mad girl whom we took to the hospital at Amiens, as we were on our way to join the army of the Loire, and who died there, raving, three days later.”
“I can well believe it,” I said to him; “she had lost her foster-father!”
“Oh pooh! father! what is that you say?” he rejoined in a tone which he meant to be sly and suggestive.
“I say that the call to arms is being sounded,” I replied, going out. And I too exercised self-restraint.
THE VENUS OF ILLE
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
“Ιλεως, ἦν δ’ ἐγὼ, ἔοτω ὁ ἀνδριὰς καὶ ἢπιος οὔτως ἀνδρεῖος ὤν.”
Lucian, Philopseudes.