But she had scarce time even for that flash of pain to quiver in impotent impatience through her.  The trumpets sounded, the salvoes of artillery pealed out, the lances and the swords were carried up in salute; on the ground rode the Marshal of France, who represented the imperial will and presence, surrounded by his staff, by generals of division and brigade, by officers of rank, and by some few civilian riders.  An aid galloped up to her where she stood with the corps of her Spahis and gave her his orders.  The Little One nodded carelessly, and touched Etoile-Filante with the prick of the spur.  Like lightning the animal bounded forth from the ranks, rearing and plunging, and swerving from side to side, while his rider, with exquisite grace and address, kept her seat like the little semi-Arab that she was, and with a thousand curves and bounds cantered down the line of the gathered troops, with the west wind blowing from the far-distant sea, and fanning her bright cheeks till they wore the soft, scarlet flush of the glowing japonica flower.  And all down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange, longing murmur went—­the buzz of the voices which, but that discipline suppressed them, would have broken out in worshiping acclamations.

As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door of the As de Pique, she arrested her horse before the great Marshal who was the impersonation of authority, and put her hand up in salute, with her saucy, wayward laugh.  He was the impersonation of that vast, silent, awful, irresponsible power which, under the name of the Second Empire, stretched its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the soldiers of France down into nameless graves, with the desert sand choking their mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any drummer-boy that might be present.  She had all the contempt for the laws of rank of your thorough inborn democrat, all the gay, insouciant indifference to station of the really free and untrammeled nature; and, in her sight, a dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without a word or a moan, was greater than all the Marshals glittering in their stars and orders.  As for impressing her, or hoping to impress her, with rank—­pooh!  You might as well have bid the sailing clouds pause in their floating passage because they came between royalty and the sun.  All the sovereigns of Europe would have awed Cigarette not one whit more than a gathering of muleteers.  “Allied sovereigns—­bah!” she would have said, “what did that mean in ’15?  A chorus of magpies chattering over one stricken eagle!”

So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the few great personages whom Algeria could bring around them, as indifferently as she had many a time reined up before a knot of grim Turcos, smoking under a barrack-gate.  He was nothing to her:  it was her army that crowned her.