A Soldier Of The Empire | Page 2

The
Quarter knew, or fancied it knew, which did quite as well. At least, it
knew how he always took sides with the Quarter against oppression. It
knew how he had gone up into the burning tenement and brought the
children down out of the garret just before the roof fell. It knew how he
had jumped into the river that winter when it was full of ice, to save
Raoul's little lame dog which had fallen into the water; it knew how he
had reported the gendarmes for arresting poor little Aimée just for
begging a man in the Place de L'Opéra for a franc for her old
grandmother, who was blind, and how he had her released instead of
being sent to ------. But what was the need of multiplying instances! He
was "the Sergeant," a soldier of the empire, and there was not a dog in
the Quarter which did not feel and look proud when it could trot on the
inside of the sidewalk by him.
Thus the old Sergeant came to be regarded as the conservator of order
in the Quarter, and was worth more in the way of keeping it quiet than
all the gendarmes that ever came inside its precincts. And thus the
children all knew him.

One story that the Sergeant sometimes told, the girls liked to hear,
though the boys did not, because it had nothing about war in it, and
Minette and Clarisse used to cry so when it was told, that the Sergeant
would stop and put his arms around them and pet them until they only
sobbed on his shoulder.
It was of how he had, when a lonely old man, met down in Lorraine his
little Camille, whose eyes were as blue as the sky, and her hand as
white as the flower from which she took her name, and her cheeks as
pink as the roses in the gardens of the Tuileries. He had loved her, and
she, though forty years his junior, had married him and had come here
to live with him; but the close walls of the city had not suited her, and
she had pined and languished before his eyes like a plucked lily, and,
after she bore him Pierre, had died in his arms, and left him lonelier
than before. And the old soldier always lowered his voice and paused a
moment (Raoul said he was saying a mass), and then he would add
consolingly: "But she left a soldier, and when I am gone, should France
ever need one, Pierre will be here." The boys did not fancy this story
for the reasons given, and besides, although they loved the Sergeant,
they did not like Pierre. Pierre was not popular in the Quarter,--except
with the young girls and a few special friends. The women said he was
idle and vain like his mother, who had been, they said, a silly lazy thing
with little to boast of but blue eyes and a white skin, of which she was
too proud to endanger it by work, and that she had married the Sergeant
for his pension, and would have ruined him if she had lived, and that
Pierre was just like her.
The children knew nothing of the resemblance. They disliked Pierre
because he was cross and disagreeable to them, and however their older
sisters might admire his curling brown hair, his dark eyes, and delicate
features, which he had likewise inherited from his mother, they did not
like him; for he always scolded when he came home and found them
there; and he had several times ordered the whole lot out of the house;
and once he had slapped little Raoul, for which Jean Maison had beaten
him. Of late, too, when it drew near the hour for him to come home, the
old Sergeant had two or three times left out a part of his story, and had
told them to run away and come back in the morning, as Pierre liked to

be quiet when he came from his work--which Raoul said was gambling.
Thus it was that Pierre was not popular in the Quarter.
He was nineteen years old when war was declared.
They said Prussia was trying to rob France,--to steal Alsace and
Lorraine. All Paris was in an uproar. The Quarter, always ripe for any
excitement, shared in and enjoyed the general commotion. It struck off
from work. It was like the commune; at least, so people said. Pierre was
the loudest declaimer in the district. He got work in the armory.
Recruiting officers went in and out of the saloons and cafés, drinking
with the men, talking to the women, and stirring up as much fervor as
possible. It needed little to stir it. The Quarter