at the time when he poured his griefs into the Breton’s heart.  Dumay loved these little ones without having seen them, solely through the sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the father of every child.  The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in 1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808.  The unfortunate lieutenant-colonel, long without tidings of these cherished darlings, was sent, at the peace of 1814, across Russia and Prussia on foot, accompanied by the lieutenant.  No difference of epaulets could count between the two friends, who reached Frankfort just as Napoleon was disembarking at Cannes.

Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who had always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even by his dying bed.  Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of the Empire.  At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying on the genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite as often beyond as at the bottom of current events.  The old man had purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men during his magnificent campaign in France.  “I tie in goddon,” said the father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet a grief which distressed him.  “I owe no mann anything—­” and he died, still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.

Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck, Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of the Legion of honor.  The colonel dreamed of being count and general after the first victory.  Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of Waterloo.  The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and left Tours before the disbandment of the army.

In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife’s property out of the funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of Napoleon.  He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the hurly-burly of the retreat.  Dumay shared the opinions and the anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little girls and followed Charles like a spaniel.  The latter, confidence that the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil capacity.  Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.