, he was excessively severe in the service, and this
stiffness and severity he had brought, it was said, into his household.

With these military qualities; passive obedience, scrupulous cleanliness
and the vulgar courage necessary for a son of Mars, Durand, with a good
reputation and full of zeal, had had when very young, a rapid advance. At
one moment he had foreseen a brilliant future, but his ambitious hopes had
been quickly deceived. He saw the Baron de Chipotier, the Comte de
Boisflottant, and the son of Pillardin, the lucky millionaire, successively
come into the regiment, and these sprigs of lofty lineage, full of
brilliancy and loquacity, naturally eclipsed the modest qualities of the
obscure upstart soldier. Spending their life in cafes, overwhelmed with
debt, loved by the women, they laughed among themselves at all the
_minutiae_ of the service, which they treated as beneath their notice,
ridiculed their superiors, and especially the serious-minded officers.
Everything was forgiven them, they were rich. Durand was filled with
indignation; he saw everything he had respected become an object of sarcasm
to these young men, and his most cherished convictions turned into
ridicule. He was like those devout persons who, when they hear an unseemly
oath or an impious word, tremble and pray heaven not to cast its avenging
lightning; he asked himself if social order was not overthrown, if the army
was not marching to its ruin. He began to talk of his apprehensions, of
this pitiable state of things, and they laughed in his face. But when these
frivolous, turbulent, incapable officers became his chiefs, chiefs over
him, the studious, model officer, the upright man, the slave to the
regulations, he began to mistrust everything, society, France, the empire,
the justice of God, and himself. It was from this period that the crabbed
character dated, by which he was known.

He passed a long season thus, full of anger and jealousy: then the time for
his retirement arrived, that time to which all the forgotten, the obscure,
the pariahs of the army look forward during long years, and which casts
them forth into the social world, ignorant and strangers.

Then he had retired to his own village, dividing his time between the
tending of his garden, and the cares which were occasioned him by his
daughter Suzanne.

XV.

MEMORIES.

"Often risen from humble origin, he
has gained the respect of all and the
public estee