“Francais!”

That was all she said; in that one word of their common nationality she spoke alike to the Marshal of the Empire and to the conscript of the ranks.  “Francais!” That one title made them all equal in her sight; whoever claimed it was honored in her eyes, and was precious to her heart, and when she answered them that it was nothing, this thing which they glorified in her, she answered but what seemed the simple truth in her code.  She would have thought it “nothing” to have perished by shot, or steel, or flame, in day-long torture for that one fair sake of France.

Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she was docile and submissive as the most patient child; here she deemed the greatest and the hardest thing that she could ever do far less than all that she would willingly have done.  And as she looked upon the host whose thousand and ten thousand voices rang up to the noonday sun in her homage, and in hers alone, a light like a glory beamed upon her face that for once was white and still and very grave—­none who saw her face then ever forgot that look.

In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud and pure ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, in all its perfect splendor.  In that moment she knew that divine hour which, born of a people’s love and of the impossible desires of genius in its youth, comes to so few human lives—­knew that which was known to the young Napoleon when, in the hot hush of the nights of July, France welcomed the Conqueror of Italy.  And in that moment there was an intense stillness; the Army crowned as its bravest and its best a woman-child in the springtime of her girlhood.

Then Cigarette laid her hand on the Cross that had been the dream of her years since she had first seen the brazen glisten of the eagles above her wondering eyes of infancy, and loosened it from above her heart, and stretched her hand out with it to the great Chief.

“M. le Marshal, this is not for me.”

“Not for you!  The Emperor bestows it——­”

Cigarette saluted with her left hand, still stretching to him the decoration with the other.

“It is not for me—­not while I wear it unjustly.”

“Unjustly!  What is your meaning?  My child, you talk strangely.  The gifts of the Empire are not given lightly.”

“No; and they shall not be given unfairly.  Listen.”  The color had flushed back, bright and radiant, to her cheeks; her eyes glanced with their old daring; her contemptuous, careless eloquence returned, and her voice echoed, every note distinct as the notes of a trumpet-call, down the ranks of the listening soldiery.  “Hark you!  The Emperor sends me this Cross; France thanks me; the Army applauds me.  Well, I thank them, one and all.  Cigarette was never yet ungrateful; it is the sin of the coward.  But I say I will not take what is unjustly mine, and this preference to me is unjust.  I saved the day at Zaraila?