to the shop-girls--that large, open-hearted flower, scattering its
petals to all the winds, was the symbol of your glorious youth.
You despised neither wine nor tobacco; but you despised life.
Neither delicacy nor common sense could have been learned from you,
Captain; but you taught me, even at an age when my nurse had to wipe
my nose, a lesson of honour and self-abrogation that I shall never
forget.

You have now been sleeping for many years in the Cemetery of Mont-
Parnasse, under a plain slab bearing the epitaph:

CI-GIT
ARISTIDE VICTOR MALDENT,
Capitaine d'Infanterie,
Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.

But such, Captain, was not the inscription devised by yourself to
be placed above those old bones of yours--knocked about so long on
fields of battle and in haunts of pleasure. Among your papers was
found this proud and bitter epitaph, which, despite your last will
none could have ventured to put upon your tomb:

CI-GIT
UN BRIGAND DE LA LOIRE

"Therese, we will get a wreath of immortelles to-morrow, and lay
them on the tomb of the Brigand of the Loire." ...

But Therese is not here. And how, indeed, could she be near me,
seeing that I am at the rondpoint of the Champs-Elysees? There,