But it is not the long, tedious military articles which first attract his
eye, nor the ministerial decrees, nor the studies on the sabretache, nor
the biographies of celebrated skin breeches, nor the improvement of gaiter
buttons, nor the changes of police caps; PROMOTIONS AND CHANGES, that is
what he wants.

PROMOTIONS AND CHANGES! divine rubrics which have caused so many hearts to
beat.

You all recollect it, my old brothers in arms, who have waited long, like
me. Years and years have passed. At length the hour is come and the
newspaper which is going to transform your life. That folded paper gleams
with all the fires of hope, it glitters like a sun, for it contains the
magic word which out of nothing is going to make you everything, to draw
you out of the obscure ranks to place you in the brilliant phalanx, which,
from a passive despised instrument, is going to create you an active and
respected head.

How you are dazzled as you open it; with what palpitations and haste you
look for the blessed page, skipping the regiments, glancing over the ranks,
flying over the names in order to arrive at your own. Ah! you know well
where it ought to be; it is among the last; but what does it matter, it is
here above all that the last can arrive first.

Here it is! here it is at last! What intoxication! young and old, we all
were twenty once.

And meanwhile....

And meanwhile, the best days of your youth are lost in barren, vulgar,
common-place, at times repulsive occupations. Your spirit is extinguished,
your responsibility as an intelligent man is destroyed at settled hours by
the sound of the bugle or of the trumpet, those flourishes of gilded
servitude; and beneath the heavy hammer of passive obedience your temples
are already growing grey; you have wrinkles on your forehead and on your
heart, for you have reached that part of the cup of life, at which one
drinks little else than bitterness ... But you forget all that; a new life
full of enchantment is beginning. You are an officer! an officer! Ah! those
who have never borne the harness, do not know what fairy-land that magic
word contains. But you--you know it, and you took at your name, you spell
each letter of it and you say: "At last! It is I, it is really I!
Sub-lieutenant! I am sub-lieutenant!"

Thus, ten to fifteen years of struggles, tribulation, obstacles,
humiliations, devotion, dangers, in order to reach the salary of a grocer's
clerk!

But the old Captain