aive grace and bashful coquetry she served the tea, going from one
table to another, cup in hand, followed by the one-armed captain with
silver epaulets, carrying the plum-cake! In order to see her again, M.
Violette paid the captain visit after visit. But the greater part of
the time he saw only the old soldier, who told him of his victories and
conquests, of the attack of the redoubt at Borodino, and the frightful
swearing of the dashing Murat, King of Naples, as he urged the squadrons
on to the rescue. At last, one beautiful Sunday in autumn, he found
himself alone with the young girl in the private garden of the veteran
of the Old Guard. He seated himself beside Lucie on a stone bench: he
told her his love, with the profound gaze of the Little Corporal, in
bronzed plaster, resting upon them; and, full of delicious confusion,
she replied, "Speak to mamma," dropping her bewildered eyes and gazing
at the bed of china-asters, whose boxwood border traced the form of a
cross of the Legion of Honor.

And all this was effaced, lost forever! The captain was dead; Lucie's
mother was dead, and Lucie herself, his beloved Lucie, was dead, after
giving him six years of cloudless happiness.

Certainly, he would never marry again. Oh, never!

No woman had ever existed or ever would exist for him but his poor
darling, sleeping in the Montparnasse Cemetery, whose grave he visited
every Sunday with a little watering-pot concealed under his coat.

He recalled, with a shiver of disgust, how, a few months after Lucie's
death, one stifling evening in July, he was seated upon a bench in the
Luxembourg, listening to the drums beating a retreat under the trees,
when a woman came and took a seat beside him and looked at him steadily.
Surprised by her significant look, he replied, to the question that she
addressed to him, timidly and at the same time boldly: "So this is the
way that you take the air?" And when she ended by asking him, "Come to
my house," he had followed her. But he had hardly entered when the past
all came back to him, and he felt a stifled feeling of distress. Falling
into a chair, he sobbed, burying his face in his hands. His grief was so
violent that, by a feminine instinct of pity, the wretched creature took
his head in her arms, saying, in a consoling tone, "There, cry, cry, it
will do you good!" and rocked him like an infant. At last he disengaged
himself from this caress, which made him ashamed of himself, and
throw