It is of no importance, the name of the little provincial city where
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--installed himself when he was retired on a pension.
It was quite like all those other little villages which solicit without
obtaining it a branch of the railway; just as if it were not the sole
dissipation of the natives to go every day, at the same hour, to the
Place de la Fontaine to see the diligence come in at full gallop, with
its gay cracking of the whips and clang of bells.
It was a place of three thousand inhabitants--ambitiously denominated
souls in the statistical tables--and was exceedingly proud of its title
of chief city of the canton. It had ramparts planted with trees, a
pretty river with good fishing, a church of the charming epoch of the
flamboyant Gothic, disgraced by a frightful station of the cross,
brought directly from the quarter of Saint Sulpice. Every Monday its
market was gay with great red and blue umbrellas, and countrymen filled
its streets in carts and carriages. But for the rest of the week it
retired with delight into that silence and solitude which made it so
dear to its rustic population. Its streets were paved with
cobble-stones; through the windows of the ground-floor one could see
samplers and wax-flowers under glass domes, and, through the gates of
the gardens, statuettes of Napoleon in shell-work. The principal inn was
naturally called the Shield of France; and the town-clerk made rhymed
acrostics for the ladies of society.
Captain Mercadier had chosen that place of retreat for the simple reason
that he had been born there, and because, in his noisy childhood, he had
pulled down the signs and plugged up the bell-buttons. He returned there
to find neither relations, nor friends, nor acquaintances; and the
recollections of his youth recalled only the angry faces of shop-keepers
who shook their fists at him from the shop-doors, a catechism which
threatened him with hell, a school which predicted the scaffold, and,
finally, his departure for his regiment, hastened by a paternal
malediction.
For the Captain was not a saintly man; the old record of his punishment
was black with days in the guard-house inflicted for breaches of
discipline, absences from roll-calls, and nocturnal uproars in the
mess-room. He had often narrowly escaped losing his stripes as a
corporal or a sergeant, and he needed all the chance, all the license of
a campaigning life to gain his first epaulet. Firm and brave soldier, he
had passed almost all his life in Algiers at that time when our foot
soldiers wore the high shako, white shoulder-belts and huge
cartridge-boxes. He had had Lamoricière for commander. The Due de
Nemours, near whom he received his first wound, had decorated him, and
when he was sergeant-major, Père Bugrand had called him by his name and
pulled his ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el-Kader, bearing the
scar of a yataghan stroke on his neck, of one ball in his shoulder and
another in his chest; and notwithstanding absinthe, duels, debts of
play, and almond-eyed Jewesses, he fairly won, with the point of the
bayonet and sabre, his grade of captain in the First Regiment of
Sharp-shooters.
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--had just retired on his pension, not quite two
thousand francs, which, joined to the two hundred and fifty francs from
his cross, placed him in that estate of honorable penury which the State
reserves for its old servants.
His entry into his natal city was without ostentation. He arrived one
morning on the imperiale of the diligence, chewing an extinguished
cigar, and already on good terms with the conductor, to whom, during his
journey, he had related the passage of the Porte de Fer; full of
indulgence, moreover, for the distractions of his auditor, who often
interrupted the recital by some oath or epithet addressed to the off
mare. When the diligence stopped he threw on the sidewalk his old
valise, covered with railway placards as numerous as the changes of
garrison that its proprietor had made, and the idlers of the
neighborhood were astonished to see a man with a decoration--a rare
thing in the province--offer a glass of wine to the coachman at the bar
of an inn near by.
He installed himself at once. In a house in the outskirts, where two
captive cows lowed, and fowls and ducks passed and repassed through the
gate-way, a furnished chamber was to let. Preceded by a
masculine-looking woman, the Captain climbed the stair-way with its
great wooden balusters, perfumed by a strong odor of the stable, and
reached a great tiled room, whose walls were covered with a bizarre
paper representing, printed in blue on a white background and repeated
infinitely, the picture of Joseph Poniatowski crossing the Elster on his
horse. This monotonous decoration, recalling nevertheless our military
glories, fascinated the Captain without doubt, for, without concerning
himself with the uncomfortable straw chairs, the walnut furniture, or
the little bed with its yellowed curtain, he took the room without
hesitation. A quarter of an hour was enough to empty his trunk, hang up
his clothes, put his boots in a corner, and ornament the wall with a
trophy composed of three pipes, a sabre, and a pair of pistols. After a
visit to the grocer's, over the way, where he bought a pound of candles
and a bottle of rum, he returned, put his purchase on the mantle-shelf,
and looked around him with an air of perfect satisfaction. And then,
with the promptitude of the camp, he shaved without a mirror, brushed
his coat, cocked his hat over his ear, and went for a walk in the
village in search of a café.