“No!” cried Clementine, with redoubled energy and emotion.  “Do not curse him, Monsieur Leon!  He has suffered so much!  Ah! poor, poor, unfortunate man!”

Mlle. Sambucco felt a little ashamed.  She made excuses for her niece, and declared that never, since her tenderest childhood, had she manifested such extreme sensitiveness ...  Clementine was no sensitive plant.  She was not even a romantic school-girl.  Her youth had not been nourished by Anne Radcliffe, she did not trouble herself about ghosts, and she would go through the house very tranquilly at ten o’clock at night without a candle.  When her mother died, some months before Leon’s departure, she did not wish to have any one share with her the sad satisfaction of watching and praying in the death chamber.

“This will teach us,” said the aunt, “what staying up after ten o’clock does.  What! it is midnight, within a quarter of an hour!  Come, my child; you will recover fast enough after you get to bed.”

Clementine arose submissively; but at the moment of leaving the laboratory she retraced her steps, and with a caprice more inexplicable than her grief, she absolutely demanded to see the mummy of the colonel again.  Her aunt scolded in vain; in spite of the remarks of Mlle. Sambucco and all the others present, she reopened the walnut box, knelt down beside the mummy, and kissed it on the forehead.

“Poor man!” said she, rising.  “How cold he is!  Monsieur Leon, promise me that if he is dead you will have him laid in consecrated ground!”

“As you please, mademoiselle.  I intended to send him to the anthropological museum, with my father’s permission; but you know that we can refuse you nothing.”

Selections from ‘The Man with the Broken Ear’ used by permission of Henry Holt and Company.

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

From ‘The Man with the Broken Ear’:  by permission of Henry Holt, the Translator.

Forthwith the colonel marched and opened the windows with a precipitation which upset the gazers among the crowd.

“People,” said he, “I have knocked down a hundred beggarly pandours, who respect neither sex nor infirmity.  For the benefit of those who are not satisfied, I will state that I call myself Colonel Fougas of the Twenty-third.  And Vive l’Empereur!”

A confused mixture of plaudits, cries, laughs, and jeers answered this unprecedented allocution.  Leon Renault hastened out to make apologies to all to whom they were due.  He invited a few friends to dine the same evening with the terrible colonel, and of course he did not forget to send a special messenger to Clementine.  Fougas, after speaking to the people, returned to his hosts, swinging himself along with a swaggering air, set himself astride a chair, took hold of the ends of his mustache, and said:—­

“Well!  Come, let’s talk this over.  I’ve been sick, then?”