Monday, 3d.
At ten o'clock precisely my father saw from the window Coretti, the
wood-seller, and his son waiting for me in the square, and said to me:--
"There they are, Enrico; go and see your king."
I went like a flash. Both father and son were even more alert than
usual, and they never seemed to me to resemble each other so strongly as
this morning. The father wore on his jacket the medal for valor between
two commemorative medals, and his mustaches were curled and as pointed
as two pins.
We at once set out for the railway station, where the king was to arrive
at half-past ten. Coretti, the father, smoked his pipe and rubbed his
hands. "Do you know," said he, "I have not seen him since the war of
'sixty-six? A trifle of fifteen years and six months. First, three years
in France, and then at Mondovi, and here, where I might have seen him, I
have never had the good luck of being in the city when he came. Such a
combination of circumstances!"
He called the King "Umberto," like a comrade. Umberto commanded the 16th
division; Umberto was twenty-two years and so many days old; Umberto
mounted a horse thus and so.
"Fifteen years!" he said vehemently, accelerating his pace. "I really
have a great desire to see him again. I left him a prince; I see him
once more, a king. And I, too, have changed. From a soldier I have
become a hawker of wood." And he laughed.