Here it is! here it is at last!  What intoxication! young and old, we all were twenty once.

And meanwhile....

And meanwhile, the best days of your youth are lost in barren, vulgar, common-place, at times repulsive occupations.  Your spirit is extinguished, your responsibility as an intelligent man is destroyed at settled hours by the sound of the bugle or of the trumpet, those flourishes of gilded servitude; and beneath the heavy hammer of passive obedience your temples are already growing grey; you have wrinkles on your forehead and on your heart, for you have reached that part of the cup of life, at which one drinks little else than bitterness ...  But you forget all that; a new life full of enchantment is beginning.  You are an officer! an officer!  Ah! those who have never borne the harness, do not know what fairy-land that magic word contains.  But you—­you know it, and you took at your name, you spell each letter of it and you say:  “At last!  It is I, it is really I!  Sub-lieutenant!  I am sub-lieutenant!”

Thus, ten to fifteen years of struggles, tribulation, obstacles, humiliations, devotion, dangers, in order to reach the salary of a grocer’s clerk!

But the old Captain, what was he looking for in the columns of the Service newspaper?

He had nothing to expect.  No new promotion could swell his aged breast.  He had completed his career.  Like a rejected charger whose ear has been slit, or whose right flank has been branded, he had been laid aside for ever.  Henceforth he had nothing else to do but to plant his cabbages, until his legs were seized by anchylosis, absolutely forgotten.

And so with all those who go away.

Amidst the thousand incidents of military life, so filled in its leisure and so empty in its employments, has anyone the time to give a thought to the absent one who must return no more?  His place is taken; a new face is seated there where we used to see him, and his is no longer familiar to us.  A few years hence and his name will be known no more.  The army is for the young!

But does he forget?  Does a man forget his youth, his glory, his dearest memories, his whole life?  Retired into some country nook, completely buried in an obscure market-town, or become the modest citizen of some provincial city, the old officer follows afar off with solicitude and envy the different fortunes of his brothers in arms, living ever in thought amidst that forgetful and ungrateful family which he loves as much as his own—­the Regiment.

And that is why you, brave veterans, understand it well, that is why Captain Durand used to read the Moniteur.

XVII.

THE VOLTAIRIAN.

“For them religion is the most skillful of juggling, the most favourable veil, the most respectable disguise under which man can conceal himself to lie and deceive.”

  BARNUM (Les Blagues de l’Univers).