I almost forgot to mention that I have also recovered my horse, which had been appropriated by a civil functionary and smuggled into the country upon the return of our forces. Although I shall not be reassigned to the coast-guard service, I am permitted to retain the animal at my own expense. We learn to-day that Marshal Davoust is advancing rapidly through Mecklenburg, and has already issued a proclamation from Schwerin, where roses count for passports. In a very few days we shall be sufficiently reorganized to follow. Every step will bring me nearer to my brothers. God bless you all, my dear parents and sisters! These leaves at last will be wafted homeward to-day. More in a few days from our eastward line of march.
Note.—Lieutenant Diss Debar served in the corps of Davoust until the departure of Napoleon for Elba. The second invasion found him promoted to a captaincy, and engaged in the defence of Neu Breisach, which closed his military career. After the restoration of the Bourbons the influence of his father's Legitimist friends procured for him a comfortable position in the administration of "Waters and Forests," which he retained through all the political changes up to within a few years of his death, in 1864, in the eighty-fifth year of his age. His brother Frank was exchanged in 1815, and returned to France, but "poor little Louis" was not destined to the same good fortune. He died at Riga in January, 1814, from amputation of his frozen feet, the result of barbarous exposure.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] The writer of these letters, Joseph Diss Debar, served with the corps of Marshal Davonst. Before the French Revolution his father had filled the office of intendant of domains of the prince-cardinal de Rohan-Guéménée, of royal necklace memory, then residing on his estates at Saverne, Alsace, in the diocese of Strassburg, of which he was the beneficiary. Soon after the capture of the Bastille the revolutionary movement spread to this locality, and destroyed, imprisoned or drove into exile all the avowed adherents of the royal cause, including the cardinal and his friends. The greater part of the Saverne refugees gathered at Ettenheim in Baden, only one league from the Rhine, where a large stipend, allowed to the cardinal by the British government, enabled him to keep his friends and followers above want until they could find other means of support. Thirteen years later Ettenheim also attracted the unfortunate duc d'Enghien, who in March, 1804, was kidnapped by orders of Bonaparte and shot in the ditch at Vincennes. The terror inspired by this high-handed coup d'état, which destroyed the émigrés' safety upon neutral soil, caused many of the younger generation of exiles to return to their native country and to enter the army, the military career being the only one open to them. Among these were the writer and his two brothers, the oldest being then twenty-four and the youngest seventeen years of age.
A PORTRAIT.
Every day I passed there in going between the room where I lodge and my business. It was an old shop, full of trash, ambitious of being a bric-à-brac establishment, but its contents had neither beauty nor pedigree to recommend them, only age and cheapness. Its doorsill lay even with the pavement, inviting custom by an easy access, while repelling it by its squalor. The light entered hesitatingly through a cobwebbed window, as if loath to touch the unsightly objects within. Of these, some few had strayed through the door and stood in blinking confusion on the sidewalk—chairs with three legs, desks with no shelves, sofas without seats, clocks eternally silent, and ornaments maimed, cracked, and seamed with glue.
It was in this company I first saw him. He had dark eyes with heavy lids, that gave a pathetic look to his face, and one eyebrow was slightly pointed near its termination on the temple, while the other was straight—an irregularity often found in persons of erratic temperament. His nose, sensitive and refined, was in beautiful proportion to the face: his full lips and square chin were partly concealed by a curling brown beard and moustache, and the hair, which met a forehead rather broad than high, was of the same color. Perhaps I should have mentioned that he was a portrait.
How had he arrived among his present surroundings, standing on the dirty street, smeared with mud that passing feet cast in his face, splashed by rain, and torn from contact with the edges of chairs or the careless canes of pedestrians—even showing the print of a boot-heel impressed on one cheek? At times he disappeared for days together, as if lost in the maze within: then again I would see his tragic eyes gazing at me through a pelting storm or his skin blistering under a blinding sun. Was it any wonder that I sought to save him from his capricious fate—that I pitied him, that I bought him?
I took the opportunity of doing so when the owner of the shop, whom I respectfully christened Sticks, was absent, and was thereby enabled to purchase the portrait from a shock-headed boy in charge for the modest sum of two francs.