"Faith, yes!" said Bonaparte, joyfully. Then holding him close
after kissing him twice, "And so it was you who gave Valence
that sword thrust?"

"My word!" said the new captain and future aide-de-camp, "you
were there when I promised it to him. A soldier keeps his word."

Eight days later Captain Montrevel was doing duty as staff-officer
to the commander-in-chief, who changed his name of Louis, then
in ill-repute, to that of Roland. And the young man consoled
himself for ceasing to be a descendant of St. Louis by becoming
the nephew of Charlemagne.

Roland--no one would have dared to call Captain Montrevel Louis
after Bonaparte had baptized him Roland--made the campaign of
Italy with his general, and returned with him to Paris after
the peace of Campo Formio.

When the Egyptian expedition was decided upon, Roland, who had been
summoned to his mother's side by the death of the Brigadier-General
de Montrevel, killed on the Rhine while his son was fighting on
the Adige and the Mincio, was among the first appointed by the
commander-in-chief to accompany him in the useless but poetical
crusade which he was planning. He left his mother, his sister Amelie,
and his young brother Edouard at Bourg, General de Montrevel's
native town. They resided some three-quarters of a mile out of
the city, at Noires-Fontaines, a charming house, called a chateau,
which, together with the farm and several hundred acres of land
surrounding it, yielded an income of six or eight thousand livres
a year, and constituted the general's entire fortune. Roland's