limbers. It will be a bad day for Europe when the French start
travelling again, for they are slow to leave their homes, but when they
have done so no one can say how far they will go if they have a guide
like our little man to point out the way. But the great days are gone
and the great men are dead, and here am I, the last of them, drinking
wine of Suresnes and telling old tales in a cafe.

But it is of Venice that I would speak. The folk there live like
water-rats upon a mud-bank, but the houses are very fine, and the
churches, especially that of St. Mark, are as great as any I have seen.
But above all they are proud of their statues and their pictures, which
are the most famous in Europe. There are many soldiers who think that
because one's trade is to make war one should never have a thought above
fighting and plunder. There was old Bouvet, for example--the one who was
killed by the Prussians on the day that I won the Emperor's medal; if
you took him away from the camp and the canteen, and spoke to him of
books or of art, he would sit and stare at you. But the highest soldier
is a man like myself who can understand the things of the mind and the
soul. It is true that I was very young when I joined the army, and that
the quarter-master was my only teacher, but if you go about the world
with your eyes open you cannot help learning a great deal.

Thus I was able to admire the pictures in Venice, and to know the names
of the great men, Michael Titiens, and Angelus, and the others, who had
painted them. No one can say that Napoleon did not admire them also, for
the very first thing which he did when he captured the town was to send
the best of them to Paris. We all took what we could get, and I had two
pictures for my share.

One of them, called "Nymphs Surprised," I kept for myself, and the
other, "Saint Barbara," I sent as a present for my mother.

It must be confessed, however, that some of our men behaved very badly
in this matter of the statues and the pictures. The people at Venice
were very much attached to them, and as to the four bronze horses which
stood over the gate of their great church, they loved them as dearly as
if they had been their children. I have always been a judge of a horse,
and I had a good look at these ones, but I could not see that there was
much to be said for them. They were too coarse-limbed for light cavalry
charges and they had not the weight for the gun-teams.

However, they were