“Yes, young man, I did the campaign of 1815.  I was a captain at Mont-Saint-Jean, and I retired to the Loire, after we were all disbanded.  Faith!  I was disgusted with France; I couldn’t stand it.  In fact, I should certainly have got myself arrested; so off I went, with two or three dashing fellows,—­Selves, Besson, and others, who are now in Egypt,—­and we entered the service of pacha Mohammed; a queer sort of fellow he was, too!  Once a tobacco merchant in the bazaars, he is now on the high-road to be a sovereign prince.  You’ve all seen him in that picture by Horace Vernet,—­’The Massacre of the Mameluks.’  What a handsome fellow he was!  But I wouldn’t give up the religion of my fathers and embrace Islamism; all the more because the abjuration required a surgical operation which I hadn’t any fancy for.  Besides, nobody respects a renegade.  Now if they had offered me a hundred thousand francs a year, perhaps—­and yet, no!  The pacha did give me a thousand talari as a present.”

“How much is that?” asked Oscar, who was listening to Georges with all his ears.

“Oh! not much.  A talaro is, as you might say, a five-franc piece.  But faith!  I got no compensation for the vices I contracted in that God-forsaken country, if country it is.  I can’t live now without smoking a narghile twice a-day, and that’s very costly.”

“How did you find Egypt?” asked the count.

“Egypt?  Oh!  Egypt is all sand,” replied Georges, by no means taken aback.  “There’s nothing green but the valley of the Nile.  Draw a green line down a sheet of yellow paper, and you have Egypt.  But those Egyptians—­fellahs they are called—­have an immense advantage over us.  There are no gendarmes in that country.  You may go from end to end of Egypt, and you won’t see one.”

“But I suppose there are a good many Egyptians,” said Mistigris.

“Not as many as you think for,” replied Georges.  “There are many more Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs.  But all that kind of animal is very uninteresting, and I was glad enough to embark on a Genoese polacca which was loading for the Ionian Islands with gunpowder and munitions for Ali de Tebelen.  You know, don’t you, that the British sell powder and munitions of war to all the world, —­Turks, Greeks, and the devil, too, if the devil has money?  From Zante we were to skirt the coasts of Greece and tack about, on and off.  Now it happens that my name of Georges is famous in that country.  I am, such as you see me, the grandson of the famous Czerni-Georges who made war upon the Porte, and, instead of crushing it, as he meant to do, got crushed himself.  His son took refuge in the house of the French consul at Smyrna, and he afterwards died in Paris, leaving my mother pregnant with me, his seventh child.  Our property was all stolen by friends of my grandfather; in fact, we were ruined.  My mother, who lived on her diamonds, which she sold one by one, married,