f the reveille--knew that they loved to laugh
even with the death-rattle in their throats, and with their hearts half
breaking over a comrade's corpse, would cry in burlesque mirth, "Ah, the
good fellow! He's swallowed his own cartouche!"

"Paradise!" growled Pere Matou. "Ouf! Who wants that? If one had a few
bidons of brandy, now----"

"Brandy? Oh, ha! you are to be much more of aristocrats now than that!"
cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable satire curling on her rosy piquant
lips. "The Silver Pheasants have taken to patronize you. If I were you,
I would not touch a glass, nor eat a fig; you will not, if you have
the spirit of a rabbit. You! Fed like dogs with the leavings of her
table--pardieu! That is not for soldiers of France!"

"What dost thou say?" growled Miou-Matou, peering up under his gray,
shaggy brows.

"Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That is all. Sapristi!
How easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan with two words to one's
maitre d'hotel, and a rouleau of gold that one never misses! The rich
they can buy all things, you see, even heaven, so cheap!" With which
withering satire Cigarette left Pere Matou in the conviction that he
must be already dead and among the angels if the people began to talk of
champagne to him; and flitting down between the long rows of beds with
the old disabled veterans who tended them, skimmed her way, like a bird
as she was, into another great chamber, filled, like the first, with
suffering in all stages and at all years, from the boy-conscript,
tossing in African fever, to the white-haired campaigner of a hundred
wounds.

Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming through the
entrance of the hospital, she had casually heard that Mme. la Princesse
Corona d'Amague had made a gift of singular munificence and mercy to
the invalid soldiers--a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would
brighten their long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princesse
might be she knew nothing; but the title was enough; she was a silver
pheasant--bah! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats--when they were of
the sex feminine. "An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle," she would
say, "but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peacock." Which was the
reason why she flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolence
imaginable, but took the part of "Marquise," of "Bel-a-faire-peur," and
of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings
u