saintship on Heaven--martyrdom," said De Mauleon, with a smile in which
sarcasm disappeared in melancholy. "Poor Raoul!--and what of my other
cousin, the _beau Marquis_? Several months ago his Legitimist faith
seemed vacillating--he talked to me very fairly about the duties a
Frenchman owed to France, and hinted that he should place his sword at
the command of Napoleon III. I have not yet heard of him as a _soldat de
France_--I hear a great deal of him as a _viveur de Paris_."

"Don't you know why his desire for a military career was frost-bitten?"

"No! why?"

"Alain came from Bretagne profoundly ignorant of most things known to a
_gamin_ of Paris. When he conscientiously overcame the scruples natural
to one of his name and told the Duchesse de Tarascon that he was ready to
fight under the flag of France whatever its colour, he had a vague
reminiscence of ancestral Rochebriants earning early laurels at the head
of their regiments. At all events he assumed as a matter of course that
he, in the first rank as _gentilhomme_, would enter the army, if as a
_sous-lieutenant_, still as _gentilhomme_. But when told that, as he had
been at no military college, he could only enter the ranks as a private
soldier--herd with private soldiers--for at least two years before,
passing through the grade of corporal, his birth, education, habits of
life could, with great favour, raise him to the station of a sous-
lieutenant, you may conceive that the martial ardour of a Rochebriant was
somewhat cooled."

"If he knew what the dormitory of French privates is, and how difficult
a man well educated well brought up, finds it, first, to endure the
coarsest ribaldry and the loudest blasphemy, and then, having endured and