Oscar, meantime, behaved so well that in 1830 he was first sergeant of the company of the Vicomte de Serizy, which gave him the rank of sub-lieutenant of the line.  Oscar Husson was by that time twenty-five years old.  As the Royal Guard, to which his regiment was attached, was always in garrison in Paris, or within a circumference of thirty miles around the capital, he came to see his mother from time to time, and tell her his griefs; for he had the sense to see that he could never become an officer as matters then were.  At that time the cavalry grades were all being taken up by the younger sons of noble families, and men without the article to their names found promotion difficult.  Oscar’s sole ambition was to leave the Guards and be appointed sub-lieutenant in a regiment of the cavalry of the line.  In the month of February, 1830, Madame Clapart obtained this promotion for her son through the influence of Madame la Dauphine, granted to the Abbe Gaudron, now rector of Saint-Pauls.

Although Oscar outwardly professed to be devoted to the Bourbons, in the depths of his heart he was a liberal.  Therefore, in the struggle of 1830, he went over to the side of the people.  This desertion, which had an importance due to the crisis in which it took place, brought him before the eyes of the public.  During the excitement of triumph in the month of August he was promoted lieutenant, received the cross of the Legion of honor, and was attached as aide-de-camp to La Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832.  When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal.  The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment.  At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy was left wounded under a dead horse.  Oscar, discovering this, called out to the squadron: 

“Messieurs, it is going to death, but we cannot abandon our colonel.”

He dashed upon the enemy, and his electrified soldiers followed him.  The Arabs, in their first astonishment at this furious and unlooked-for return, allowed Oscar to seize the viscount, whom he flung across his horse, and carried off at full gallop,—­receiving, as he did so, two slashes from yataghans on his left arm.

Oscar’s conduct on this occasion was rewarded with the officer’s cross of the Legion of honor, and by his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.  He took the most affectionate care of the Vicomte de Serizy, whose mother came to meet him on the arrival of the regiment at Toulon, where, as we know, the young man died of his wounds.

The Comtesse de Serizy had not separated her son from the man who had shown him such devotion.  Oscar himself was so seriously wounded that the surgeons whom the countess had brought with her from Paris thought best to amputate his left arm.