at his commandant could
overhear him.

There was a burst of laughter at the words, for the lieutenant's father
cringed to all the powers that be; he was a man of supple intellect,
accustomed to jump with every change of government, and his son took
after him.

Men like Genestas are met with now and again in the French army; natures
that show themselves to be wholly great at need, and relapse into their
ordinary simplicity when the action is over; men that are little mindful
of fame and reputation, and utterly forgetful of danger. Perhaps there
are many more of them than the shortcomings of our own characters
will allow us to imagine. Yet, for all that, any one who believed that
Genestas was perfect would be strangely deceiving himself. The major was
suspicious, given to violent outbursts of anger, and apt to be tiresome
in argument; he was full of national prejudices, and above all things,
would insist that he was in the right, when he was, as a matter of fact,
in the wrong. He retained the liking for good wine that he had acquired
in the ranks. If he rose from a banquet with all the gravity befitting
his position, he seemed serious and pensive, and had no mind at such
times to admit any one into his confidence.

Finally, although he was sufficiently acquainted with the customs
of society and with the laws of politeness, to which he conformed as
rigidly as if they had been military regulations; though he had real
mental power, both natural and acquired; and although he had mastered
the art of handling men, the science of tactics, the theory of sabre
play, and the mysteries of the farrier's craft, his learning had been
prodigiously neglected. He knew in a hazy kind of way that Caesar was a
Roman Consul, or an Emperor, and that Alexander was either a Greek or
a Macedonian; he would have conceded either quality or origin in both
cases without discussion. If the conversation turned on science or
history, he was wont to become thoughtful, and to confine his share in
it to little approving nods, like a man who by dint of profound thought
has arrived at scepticism.

When, at Schonbrunn, on May 13, 1809, Napoleon wrote the bulletin
addressed to the Grand Army, then the masters of Vienna, in which he
said that _like Medea, the Austrian princes had slain their children
with their own hands_; Genestas, who had been recently made a captain,
did not wish to compromise his newly conferred dignity by asking who
Medea was; he reli