“Ah, Monsieur!” he said one day, “little would you think, to see me cribbed up in this miserable bed, that I had been a soldier, or that the happiest days of my life had been passed in the woods of Fontainebleau, following the chase in the retinue of King Charles the Tenth of France. I was a wild young fellow in my boyhood; and, when at the age of eighteen I drew for the conscription and found it was my fate to serve, I believe I never was so happy in my life. I entered the cavalry; and, in spite of the heavy duties and strict discipline, it was a glorious time. It makes me mad, Monsieur, when I think of the happy days I have spent on the road, in barracks, and in snug country quarters, where there was cider or
wine for the asking; to find myself in a solitary corner of great, thoughtless Paris, sick and helpless. It would be something to die out in the open fields like a worn-out horse, or to be shot like a wounded one. But this is terrible!—and I am but thirty-eight.”
We comforted him in the best way we could with sage axioms of antique date, or more lively stories of passing events; but I saw a solitary tear creeping down the cheek of Madame Panpan, even in the midst of a quaint sally; and, under pretence of arranging his pillow, she bent over his head and kissed him gently on the forehead.
Père Panpan—I had come by degrees to call him “Père,” although he was still young; for it sounded natural and kindly—continued his narrative in his rambling, gossiping way. He had been chosen, he said, to serve in the Garde Royale, of whom fifteen thousand sabres were stationed in and about the capital at this period; and in the royal forest of Fontainebleau, in the enjoyment of a sort of indolent activity, he passed his happiest days; now employed in the chase, now in the palace immediately about the person of the king, in a succession of active pleasures, or easy, varied duties. Panpan was no republican. Indeed, I question whether any very deep political principles governed his sentiments; which naturally allied themselves with those things that yielded the greatest amount of pleasure.
The misfortunes of Père Panpan dated from the revolution of eighteen hundred and thirty. Then the glittering pageantry in the palace of Fontainebleau vanished like a dream. The wild clatter of military preparation; the rattling of steel and the trampling of horses; and away swept troop after troop, with sword-belt braced and carabine in hand, to plunge into the mad uproar of the streets of Paris, risen, stones and all, in revolution. The Garde Royale did their duty in those three terrible days, and if their gallant charges through the encumbered streets, or their patient endurance amid the merciless showers of indescribable missiles, were all in vain, it was because their foe was animated by an enthusiasm of which they knew nothing, save in the endurance of its effects. Panpan’s individual fate, amid all this turmoil, was lamentable enough.
A few hours amid the dust; the sweltering heat; the yellings of the excited populace; the roaring of cannon and the pattering of musketry; saw the troop in which he served, broken and scattered, and Panpan himself rolling in the dust, with a thousand lights flashing in his eyes, and a brass button lodged in his side!
“Those villains of Parisians!” he exclaimed, “not content with
showering their whole garde meuble upon our heads, fired upon us a diabolical collection of missiles, such as no mortal ever thought of before:—bits of broken brass; little plates of tin and iron rolled into sugar-loaves; crushed brace-buckles; crooked nails and wads of metal wire;—anything, indeed, that in their extremity they could lay their hands on, and ram into the muzzle of a gun! These things inflicted fearful gashes, and, in many cases, a mere flesh-wound turned out a death-stroke. Few that got hurt in our own troop lived to tell the tale.”
A few more days and the whole royal cavalcade was scattered like chaff before the wind, and Charles the Tenth a fugitive on his way to England; a few more days and the wily Louis Philippe was taking the oath to a new constitution, and our friend, Panpan, lay carefully packed, brass button and all, in the Hôtel-Dieu. The brass button was difficult to find, and when found the ugly fissure it had made grew gangrened, and would not heal; and thus it happened that many a bed became vacant, and got filled, and was vacant again, as their occupants either walked out, or were borne out, of the hospital gates, before Panpan was declared convalescent, and finally dismissed from the Hôtel-Dieu as “cured.”
The proud trooper was, however, an altered man; his health and spirits were gone; the whole corps of which he had so often boasted was broken up and dispersed; his means of livelihood were at an end, and, what was worse, he knew of no other in the exercise of which he could gain his daily bread. There were very many such helpless, tradeless men pacing the streets of Paris, when the fever of the revolution was cooled down, and ordinary business ways began to take their course. Nor was it those alone who were uninstructed in any useful occupation, but there were also the turbulent, dissatisfied spirits; builders of barricades, and leaders of club-sections, whom the late excitement, and their temporary elevation above their fellow workmen, had left restless and ambitious, and whose awakened energies, if not directed to some useful and congenial employment, would infallibly lead to mischief.