This young man must indeed have had a strong and well-tempered soul; for he learned in forty minutes all the woful events which fortune had scattered through eighteen years, from the first abdication up to the death of the King of Rome.  Less happy than his old companions in arms, he had no interval of repose between these terrible and repeated shocks, all beating upon his heart at the same time.  One could have feared that the blow might prove mortal, and poor Fougas die in the first hour of his recovered life.  But the imp of a fellow yielded and recovered himself in quick succession like a spring.  He cried out with admiration on hearing of the five battles of the campaign in France; he reddened with grief at the farewells of Fontainebleau.  The return from the Isle of Elba transfigured his handsome and noble countenance; at Waterloo his heart rushed in with the last army of the Empire, and there shattered itself.  Then he clenched his fists and said between his teeth, “If I had been there at the head of the Twenty-Third, Bluecher and Wellington would have seen another fate!” The invasion, the truce, the martyr of St. Helena, the ghastly terror of Europe, the murder of Murat,—­the idol of the cavalry,—­the deaths of Ney, Bruno, Mouton-Duvernet, and so many other whole-souled men whom he had known, admired, and loved, threw him into a series of paroxysms of rage; but nothing crushed him.  In hearing of the death of Napoleon, he swore that he would eat the heart of England; the slow agony of the pale and interesting heir of the Empire inspired him with a passion to tear the vitals out of Austria.  When the drama was over, and the curtain fell on Schoenbrunn, he dashed away his tears and said, “It is well.  I have lived in a moment a man’s entire life.  Now show me the map of France!”

Leon began to turn over the leaves of an atlas, while M. Renault attempted to continue narrating to the colonel the history of the Restoration, and of the monarchy of 1830.  But Fougas’s interest was in other things.

“What do I care,” said he, “if a couple of hundred babblers of deputies put one king in place of another?  Kings!  I’ve seen enough of them in the dirt.  If the Empire had lasted ten years longer, I could have had a king for a bootblack.”

When the atlas was placed before him, he at once cried out with profound disdain, “That France?” But soon two tears of pitying affection, escaping from his eyes, swelled the rivers Ardeche and Gironde.  He kissed the map and said, with an emotion which communicated itself to nearly all those who were present:—­

“Forgive me, poor old love, for insulting your misfortunes.  Those scoundrels whom we always whipped have profited by my sleep to pare down your frontiers; but little or great, rich or poor, you are my mother, and I love you as a faithful son!  Here is Corsica, where the giant of our age was born; here is Toulouse, where I first saw the light; here is Nancy, where I felt my heart awakened—­where, perhaps, she whom I call my Aegle waits for me still!  France!  Thou hast a temple in my soul; this arm is thine; thou shalt find me ever ready to shed my blood to the last drop in defending or avenging thee!”