“But he’s very popular with your men, too?”

“Monsieur, the worst quality a corporal can have.  His idea of maintaining discipline is to treat them to cognac and give them tobacco.”

“Pardieu!  Not a bad way, either, with our French fire-eaters.  He knows them that he has to deal with; that brave fellow.  Your squadrons would go to the devil after him.”

The Colonel gave a grim laugh.

“I dare say nobody knows the way better.”

Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking champagne by great glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping another’s soup, pulling the limbs of a succulent ortolan to pieces with a relish, and devouring truffles with all the zest of a bon-vivant, did not lose a word, and catching the inflection of Chateauroy’s voice, settled with her own thoughts that “Bel-a-faire-peur” was not a fair field or a smooth course with his Colonel.  The weather-cock heart of the little “Friend of the Flag” veered round, with her sex’s common custom, to the side that was the weakest.

“Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel!” she cried, while she ate M. le Colonel’s foie gras with as little ceremony and as much enjoyment as would be expected from a young plunderer accustomed to think a meal all the better spiced by being stolen “by the rules of war”—­“whatever else your handsome Corporal is, he is an aristocrat.  Ah, ha!  I know the aristocrats—­I do!  Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and nonchalant.  Give me the aristocrats—­the real thing, you know.  Not the ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being honest bread—­but the old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur.”

The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had aimed at a sore point in him.  He was of the First Empire Nobility, and he was weak enough, though a fierce, dauntless iron-nerved soldier, to be discontented with the great fact that his father had been a hero of the Army of Italy, and scarce inferior in genius to Massena, because impatient of the minor one that, before strapping on a knapsack to have his first taste of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a postilion at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais.

“Ah, my brunette!” he answered with a rough laugh, “have you taken my popular Corporal for your lover?  You should give your old friends warning first, or he may chance to get an ugly spit on a saber.”

The Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of champagne.  She felt for the first time in her life a flush of hot blood on her brown, clear cheek, well used as she was to such jests and such lovers as these.

“Ma foi!” she said coolly.  “He would be more likely to spit than be spitted if it came to a duel.  I should like to see him in a duel; there is not a prettier sight in the world when both men have science.  As for fighting for me!  Morbleau!  I will thank nobody to have the impudence to do it, unless I order them out.  Coqueline got shot for me, you remember; he was a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they killed him so clumsily, that they disfigured him terribly—­it was quite a pity.  I said then I would have no more handsome men fight about me.  You may, if you like, M. le Black Hawk.”