And aloud he added, speaking over his shoulder, “You would oblige me greatly by telling General D’Hubert at the first opportunity that his advancement saves him for a time from a pretty hot encounter.  I was only waiting for him to turn up here.”

The other officer remonstrated.

“Could you think of it, Colonel Feraud, at this time, when every life should be consecrated to the glory and safety of France?”

But the strain of unhappiness caused by military reverses had spoiled Colonel Feraud’s character.  Like many other men, he was rendered wicked by misfortune.

“I cannot consider General D’Hubert’s existence of any account either for the glory or safety of France,” he snapped viciously.  “You don’t pretend, perhaps, to know him better than I do—­I who have met him half a dozen times on the ground—­do you?”

His interlocutor, a young man, was silenced.  Colonel Feraud walked up and down the room.

“This is not the time to mince matters,” he said.  “I can’t believe that that man ever loved the Emperor.  He picked up his general’s stars under the boots of Marshal Berthier.  Very well.  I’ll get mine in another fashion, and then we shall settle this business which has been dragging on too long.”

General D’Hubert, informed indirectly of Colonel Feraud’s attitude, made a gesture as if to put aside an importunate person.  His thoughts were solicited by graver cares.  He had had no time to go and see his family.  His sister, whose royalist hopes were rising higher every day, though proud of her brother, regretted his recent advancement in a measure, because it put on him a prominent mark of the usurper’s favour, which later on could have an adverse influence upon his career.  He wrote to her that no one but an inveterate enemy could say he had got his promotion by favour.  As to his career, he assured her that he looked no farther forward into the future than the next battlefield.

Beginning the campaign of France in this dogged spirit, General D’Hubert was wounded on the second day of the battle under Laon.  While being carried off the field he heard that Colonel Feraud, promoted this moment to general, had been sent to replace him at the head of his brigade.  He cursed his luck impulsively, not being able at the first glance to discern all the advantages of a nasty wound.  And yet it was by this heroic method that Providence was shaping his future.  Travelling slowly south to his sister’s country home under the care of a trusty old servant, General D’Hubert was spared the humiliating contacts and the perplexities of conduct which assailed the men of Napoleonic empire at the moment of its downfall.  Lying in his bed, with the windows of his room open wide to the sunshine of Provence, he perceived the undisguised aspect of the blessing conveyed by that jagged fragment of a Prussian shell, which, killing his horse and ripping open his thigh, saved him from an active conflict with his conscience.  After the last fourteen years spent sword in hand in the saddle, and with the sense of his duty done to the very end, General D’Hubert found resignation an easy virtue.  His sister was delighted with his reasonableness.  “I leave myself altogether in your hands, my dear Leonie,” he had said to her.