dreadful deed but our friend the Brigadier, Etienne Gerard, of the
Hussars of Conflans, gay-riding, plume-tossing, debonnaire, the darling
of the ladies and of the six brigades of light cavalry.

But the strange part of it is that this gallant gentleman did this
hateful thing, and made himself the most unpopular man in the Peninsula,
without ever knowing that he had done a crime for which there is hardly
a name amid all the resources of our language. He died of old age, and
never once in that imperturbable self-confidence which adorned or
disfigured his character knew that so many thousand Englishmen would
gladly have hanged him with their own hands. On the contrary, he
numbered this adventure among those other exploits which he has given to
the world, and many a time he chuckled and hugged himself as he narrated
it to the eager circle who gathered round him in that humble cafe where,
between his dinner and his dominoes, he would tell, amid tears and
laughter, of that inconceivable Napoleonic past when France, like an
angel of wrath, rose up, splendid and terrible, before a cowering
continent. Let us listen to him as he tells the story in his own way
and from his own point of view.

You must know, my friends, said he, that it was towards the end of the
year eighteen hundred and ten that I and Massena and the others pushed
Wellington backwards until we had hoped to drive him and his army into
the Tagus. But when we were still twenty-five miles from Lisbon we
found that we were betrayed, for what had this Englishman done but build
an enormous line of works and forts at a place called Torres Vedras, so
that even we were unable to get through them! They lay across the whole
Peninsula, and our army was so far from home that we did not dare to
risk a reverse, and we had already learned at Busaco that it was no
child's play to fight against these people. What could we do, then, but