academic militarism or Viennese
drawing-roomism. Hence it has already begun to manufacture
"L'Empereur," and thus to make it difficult for the romanticists of a
hundred years later to credit the little scene now in question at
Tavazzano as aforesaid.

The best quarters at Tavazzano are at a little inn, the first house
reached by travellers passing through the place from Milan to Lodi. It
stands in a vineyard; and its principal room, a pleasant refuge from
the summer heat, is open so widely at the back to this vineyard that it
is almost a large veranda. The bolder children, much excited by the
alarums and excursions of the past few days, and by an irruption of
French troops at six o'clock, know that the French commander has
quartered himself in this room, and are divided between a craving to
peep in at the front windows and a mortal terror of the sentinel, a
young gentleman-soldier, who, having no natural moustache, has had a
most ferocious one painted on his face with boot blacking by his
sergeant. As his heavy uniform, like all the uniforms of that day, is
designed for parade without the least reference to his health or
comfort, he perspires profusely in the sun; and his painted moustache
has run in little streaks down his chin and round his neck except where
it has dried in stiff japanned flakes, and had its sweeping outline
chipped off in grotesque little bays and headlands, making him
unspeakably ridiculous in the eye of History a hundred years later, but
monstrous and horrible to the contemporary north Italian infant, to
whom nothing would seem more natural than that he should relieve the
monotony of his guard by pitchforking a stray child up on his bayonet,
and eating it uncooked. Nevertheless one girl of bad character, in whom
an instinct of privilege with soldiers is already dawning, does peep in
at the safest window for a moment, before a glance and a clink from the
sentinel sends her flying. Most of what she sees she has seen before:
the vineyard at the back, with the old winepress and a cart among the
vines; the door close down on her right leading to the inn entry; the
landlord's best sideboard, now in full action for dinner, further back
on the same side; the fireplace on the other side, with a couch near
it, and another door, leading to the inner rooms, between it and the
vineyard; and the table in the middle with its repast of Milanese
risotto, cheese, grapes, bread, olives, and a big wickered flask of r