om the good
Monsieur Raoul de Vandemar--my poor Armand beat me!"

De Mauleon shuddered. "Say that it is from a customer whose rooms
he decorated in his spare hours on his own account before the
strike,--Monsieur --------;" here he uttered indistinctly some
unpronounceable name and hurried off, soon lost as the streets grew
darker. Amid groups of a higher order of men-military men, nobles,
ci-devant deputies--among such ones his name stood very high. Not only
his bravery in the recent sorties had been signal, but a strong belief
in his military talents had become prevalent; and conjoined with
the name he had before established as a political writer, and the
remembrance of the vigour and sagacity with which he had opposed the
war, he seemed certain, when peace and order became established, of
a brilliant position and career in a future administration: not less
because he had steadfastly kept aloof from the existing Government,
which it was rumoured, rightly or erroneously, that he had been
solicited to join; and from every combination of the various democratic
or discontented factions.

Quitting these more distinguished associates, he took his way alone
towards the ramparts. The day was closing; the thunders of the cannon
were dying down.

He passed by a wine-shop round which were gathered many of the worse
specimens of the Moblots and National Guards, mostly drunk, and loudly
talking in vehement abuse of generals and officers and commissariat. By
one of the men, as he came under the glare of a petroleum lamp (there
was gas no longer in the dismal city), he was recognised as the
commander who had dared to insist on discipline, and disgrace honest
patriots who claimed to themselves the sole option between fight and
flight. The man was one of those patriots--one of the new recruits whom
Victor had shamed and dismissed for mutiny and cowardice. He made a
drunken plunge at his former chief, shouting, "A bas Pai-isto! Comrades,
this is the coquin De Mauleon who is paid by the Prussians for getting
us killed: a la lanterne!" "A la lanterne!" stammered and hiccupped
others of the group; but they did not stir to execute their threat.
Dimly seen as the stern face and sinewy form of the threatened man was
by their drowsied eyes, the name of De Mauleon, the man without fear
of a foe, and without ruth for a mutineer, sufficed to protect him from
outrage; and with a slight movement of his arm that sent his denouncer
reeling agains