"As a matter of form," said Major Collinot, the Adjutant of the Bodyguard, at headquarters, "Monsieur de Répentigny of course proves the necessary generations of noblesse?"
"Here is the herald's attestation, sir," replied Germain, producing that which Grancey's intercession had obtained for him at Fontainebleau.
Doubly past the strictest tests of ancestry and reassured in boldness he was now ready even to play cards with the dread Maréchale de Noailles—her who it was reported once said, "That although our Lord was born in a stable yet it must be remembered St. Joseph was of royal line and not any common carpenter."
The pomp and glitter of the new life appealed immensely to the youthful instincts of the Canadian. The Baron detailed to his fascinated listener the composition, privileges, and duties of the Gardes—
"We are thirteen hundred, Répentigny, in four companies—the Scotch, the Villeroy, the Noailles, and the Luxembourg, each over three hundred persons; we relieve each other every three months. Just now it is the turn of our company of Noailles. Of the three months, each man spends one on guard at the Palace, one at the hunting-lodge, and one at liberty; after that we withdraw to towns some distance apart, those of the Noailles company to Troyes in Champagne." He told with pride of what good stature and descent it was necessary to be to be received, how keenly sought after even the commissions as privates were, hence the fine picked appearance of the body. He dilated on the various instruments and startling costumes of his company's band; on the style of their horses and the magnificence of their reviews and parades; on the superiority of the pale blue cross-belts which distinguished them, over the silver and white ones of the Scotch company, the green of the Villeroys, the yellow of the Luxembourgs. These differences, he asserted, were the greatest distinctions under the sun.
Let us in our colder blood add to his description that each of these companies consisted of one captain, one adjutant, two lieutenant-commandants of squadron, three lieutenants, ten sub-lieutenants, two standard-bearers, ten quartermasters, two sub-quartermasters, twenty brigadiers or sergeants, two hundred and eighty guards, one timbalier, and five trumpeters. Germain studied the roll with great interest.
[CHAPTER XX]
DESCAMPATIVOS
Winter passed. The company of Noailles returned from its quarters at Troyes to Versailles. Whatever he did, his passion for Cyrène coloured every thought and scene with an artist's imposition of its own interpretations. The world in which she dwelt was to him a vision, a poem, a garden.
A change had, it is true, come over his character; he became more desperate, but if was only because the deeper had become this affection. The incident of the reprieve of la Tour, which had meanwhile reached him, sank deeper into his heart than the whole round of his pleasures, and made him anxious for the moment when he might again meet her.