addressed him as if he had not been one of his men:

"Monsieur, you cannot have anything in common with those poltroons.
Come, we haven't had a chance at them yet; we are the boys who will
give them a good basting yet, those Prussians!"

It seemed to Maurice at that moment as if a ray of cheering sunshine
had penetrated his heart. He was humiliated, vexed with himself. What!
that man was nothing more than an uneducated rustic! And he remembered
the fierce hatred that had burned in his bosom the day he was
compelled to pick up the musket that he had thrown away in a moment of
madness. But he also remembered his emotion at seeing the two big
tears that stood in the corporal's eyes when the old grandmother, her
gray hairs streaming in the wind, had so bitterly reproached them and
pointed to the Rhine that lay beneath the horizon in the distance. Was
it the brotherhood of fatigue and suffering endured in common that had
served thus to dissipate his wrathful feelings? He was Bonapartist by
birth, and had never thought of the Republic except in a speculative,
dreamy way; his feeling toward the Emperor, personally, too, inclined
to friendliness, and he was favorable to the war, the very condition
of national existence, the great regenerative school of nationalities.
Hope, all at once, with one of those fitful impulses of the
imagination, that were common in his temperament, revived in him,
while the enthusiastic ardor that had impelled him to enlist one night
again surged through his veins and swelled his heart with confidence
of victory.

"Why, of course, Corporal," he gayly replied, "we shall give them a
basting!"