the colony. He has,
however, sealed orders, to be opened only in mid-Atlantic; and when he
does open them, he finds, to his unspeakable horror, a simple command to
shoot the poet at once. He obeys; and the "frightfulness" is doubled by
the fact that a rather clumsy device of his to spare the wife the sight
of the husband's death is defeated by the still greater clumsiness of a
subordinate. She goes mad; and, as expiation, he takes charge of her,
shifts from navy to army, and carries her with him on all his campaigns,
being actually engaged in escorting her on a little mule-cart when Vigny
meets him. They part; and ten years afterwards Vigny hears that the
officer was killed at Waterloo--his victim-charge following him a few
days later. The story is well told, and not, as actual things go,
impossible. But there are some questions which it suggests. "Is it, _as
literature_, a whole?" "Is it worth telling?" and "Why on earth did the
captain obey such an order from a self-constituted authority of
scoundrels to whom no 'sacrament' could ever be binding, if it could
even exist?"[259]

[Sidenote: The second]

The second is also tragical, but less so; and is again very well told.
It is concerned with the explosion of a powder-magazine--fortunately not
the main one--at Vincennes, brought about by the over-zeal of a good old
adjutant, the happiness of whose domestic interior just before his fate
(with some other things) forms one of Vigny's favourite contrasts.

[Sidenote: and third.]

But, as in _Stello_, he has kept the best wine to the last. The single
illustration of _Grandeur_ must have, for some people, though it may not
have for all, the very rare interest of a story which would rather gain
than lose if it were true. It opens in the thick of the July
Revolution, when the veteran French army--half-hearted and gaining no
new heart from the half-dead hands which ought to have guided it--was
subjected, on a larger scale, to the same sort of treatment which the
fresh-recruited Sherwood Foresters (fortunately _not_ half-hearted)
experienced in Dublin at Easter 1916. The author, having, luckily for
himself, resigned his commission a year or two before, meets an old
friend--a certain Captain Renaud--who, though a _vieux de la vieille_,
has reached no higher position, but is adored by his men, and generally
known as "Canne de Jonc," because he always carries that not very lethal
weapon, and has been known to take it into actio