w what would have happened? I should have
been tried, and perhaps condemned, for witchcraft--yes, for
witchcraft,--or else I should have been taken hold of by the priests,
not as a scientific phenomenon, but as a religious one, a kind of
_stigmatise_. They would have made it out to their satisfaction that I
was either half a saint, or a whole devil, and in either case my life
would have become a burden to me. Only those who have lived under the
Bourbons can form an idea of the terrorizing to which they lent
themselves. People may tell you that they were kind and charitable, and
this, that, and the other. There never were greater tyrants than they
were at heart; and if the Duc d'Angouleme or the Comte de Chambord had
come to the throne, France would have sunk to the intellectual level of
Spain. I would sooner see the most godless republic than a return of
that state of things, and I need not tell you that I firmly believe that
not a sparrow falls to the earth without God's will. No, I held my
tongue about my electrical sensations; if I had not, you would not now
be talking to Marshal Vaillant--I should have become a jabbering idiot,
if I had lived long enough." It is the longest speech I have ever heard
the marshal make.

The marshal's own rooms were simply crammed with cases full of
beetles, butterflies, etc. The space not taken up by these was devoted
to herbariums; and in the midst of the most interesting
conversation--interesting to the listener especially, for the old
soldier was an inexhaustible mine of anecdote--he, the listener, would
be invited to look at a bit of withered grass or a wriggling
caterpillar.

After the Franco-Austrian war, there was an addition to the marshal's
household--I might say family, for the old man became as fond of Brusca
as if she had been a human being. The story went that she had been
bequeathed to him at Solferino by her former master, an Austrian
general; and the marshal did not deny it. At any rate, he found Brusca
sitting by the dying man, and licking the blood oozing from his wounds.

Brusca was not much to look at, and you might safely have defied a
committee of the most eminent authorities on canine breeds to determine
hers, but she was very intelligent, and of a most affectionate
disposition. Nevertheless, she was always more or less distant with
civilians: it took me many years to worm myself into her good graces,
and I am almost certain that I was the only _pekin_ thus fa