“Somebody has already undertaken it,” was the reply.  “Go in if you wish to, as you knew them.  You can settle about their funeral with their friend.”

I went in.  The captain and his wife were lying side by side on a bed, and were covered by a sheet.  I raised it, and saw that the woman had inflicted a similar wound in her throat to that from which her husband had died.

At the side of the bed there sat, watching and weeping, the woman who had been mentioned to me as their best friend.  It was the lancer’s wife.

THE COLONEL’S IDEAS

“Upon my word,” Colonel Laporte said, “I am old and gouty, my legs are as stiff as two pieces of wood, and yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop.  I shall die like that; it is in the blood.  I am an old beau, one of the old school, and the sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to the tips of my toes.  There!

“And then, we are all very much alike in France; we remain cavaliers, cavaliers of love and fortune, since God has been abolished, whose body-guard we really were.  But nobody will ever get a woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of frolics on her account, as long as there is a France on the map of Europe, and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.

“When I am in the presence of a woman, of a pretty woman, I feel capable of anything.  By Jove!  When I feel her looks penetrating me, her confounded looks which set your blood on fire, I should like to do I don’t know what; to fight a duel, to have a row, to smash the furniture, in order to show that I am the strongest, the bravest, the most daring, and the most devoted of men.

“But I am not the only one, certainly not; the whole French army is like me, that I will swear to you.  From the common soldier to the general, we all go forward, and to the very end, when there is a woman in the case, a pretty woman.  Remember what Joan of Arc made us do formerly!  Come, I will make a bet that if a pretty woman had taken command of the army on the eve of Sedan, when Marshal Mac-Mahon was wounded, we should have broken through the Prussian lines, by Jove! and have had a drink out of their guns.

“It was not Trochu, but Saint-Genevieve, who was required in Paris, and I remember a little anecdote of the war which proves that we are capable of everything in the presence of a woman.

“I was a captain, a simple captain, at the time, and I was in command of a detachment of scouts, who were retreating through a district which swarmed with Prussians.  We were surrounded, pursued, tired out, and half dead with fatigue and hunger, and by the next day we were bound to reach Bar-sur-Tain, otherwise we should be done for, cut off from the main body and killed.  I do not know how we managed to escape so far.  However, we had ten leagues to go during the night, ten leagues through the snow, and with empty stomachs, and I thought to myself: