This last, still on convalescent leave, but able now to travel, had been despatched by his sister to Paris to present himself to his legitimate sovereign.  As no one in the capital could possibly know anything of the episode in the stable he was received there with distinction.  Military to the very bottom of his soul, the prospect of rising in his profession consoled him from finding himself the butt of Bonapartist malevolence, which pursued him with a persistence he could not account for.  All the rancour of that embittered and persecuted party pointed to him as the man who had never loved the Emperor—­a sort of monster essentially worse than a mere betrayer.

General D’Hubert shrugged his shoulders without anger at this ferocious prejudice.  Rejected by his old friends, and mistrusting profoundly the advances of Royalist society, the young and handsome general (he was barely forty) adopted a manner of cold, punctilious courtesy, which at the merest shadow of an intended slight passed easily into harsh haughtiness.  Thus prepared, General D’Hubert went about his affairs in Paris feeling inwardly very happy with the peculiar uplifting happiness of a man very much in love.  The charming girl looked out by his sister had come upon the scene, and had conquered him in the thorough manner in which a young girl by merely existing in his sight can make a man of forty her own.  They were going to be married as soon as General D’Hubert had obtained his official nomination to a promised command.

One afternoon, sitting on the terrasse of the Cafe Tortoni, General D’Hubert learned from the conversation of two strangers occupying a table near his own, that General Feraud, included in the batch of superior officers arrested after the second return of the king, was in danger of passing before the Special Commission.  Living all his spare moments, as is frequently the case with expectant lovers, a day in advance of reality, and in a state of bestarred hallucination, it required nothing less than the name of his perpetual antagonist pronounced in a loud voice to call the youngest of Napoleon’s generals away from the mental contemplation of his betrothed.  He looked round.  The strangers wore civilian clothes.  Lean and weather-beaten, lolling back in their chairs, they scowled at people with moody and defiant abstraction from under their hats pulled low over their eyes.  It was not difficult to recognize them for two of the compulsorily retired officers of the Old Guard.  As from bravado or carelessness they chose to speak in loud tones, General D’Hubert, who saw no reason why he should change his seat, heard every word.  They did not seem to be the personal friends of General Feraud.  His name came up amongst others.  Hearing it repeated, General D’Hubert’s tender anticipations of a domestic future adorned with a woman’s grace were traversed by the harsh regret of his warlike past, of that one long, intoxicating clash of arms, unique in the magnitude of its glory and disaster—­the