“No, I have not forgotten; but if my father sees me, and hears me, I am certain that he understands and forgives me, for it is on his account.”

“On his account?”

“Yes.  When I heard that he was dead, and when I heard how he died, all at once, without any need of reflection, I said to myself that I would be a soldier, and I will be a soldier!  Godfather, and you, Madame, I beg you not to prevent me.”

The child burst into tears—­a perfect flood of passionate tears.  The Countess and the Abbe soothed him with gentle words.

“Yes—­yes—­it is settled,” they said; “anything that you wish, all that you wish.”

Both had the same thought—­leave it to time; Jean is only a child; he will change his mind.

In this, both were mistaken; Jean did not change his mind.  In the month of September, 1876, Paul de Lavardens was rejected at Saint-Cyr, and Jean Reynaud passed eleventh at the Ecole Polytechnique.  The day when the list of the candidates who had passed was published, he wrote to the Abbe Constantin: 

“I have passed, and passed too well, for I wish to go into the army, and not the civil service; however, if I keep my place in the school, that will be the business of one of my comrades; he will have my chance.”

It happened so in the end.  Jean Reynaud did better than keep his place; the pass-list showed his name seventh, but instead of entering ’l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees’, he entered the military college at Fontainebleau in 1878.

He was then just twenty-one; he was of age, master of his fortune, and the first act of the new administration was a great, a very great piece of extravagance.

He bought for old Clemence and little Rosalie two shares in Government stock of 1,500 francs each.  That cost him 70,000 francs, almost the sum that Paul de Lavardens, in his first year of liberty in Paris, spent for Mademoiselle Lise Bruyere, of the Palais Royal Theatre.

Two years later Jean passed first at the examination, and left Fontainebleau with the right of choosing among the vacant places.  There was one in the regiment quartered at Souvigny, and Souvigny was three miles from Longueval.  Jean asked for this, and obtained it.

Thus Jean Reynaud, lieutenant in the ninth regiment of artillery, came in the month of October, 1880, to take possession of the house that had been his father’s; thus he found himself once more in the place where his childhood had passed, and where every one had kept green the memory of the life and death of his father; thus the Abbe Constantin was not denied the happiness of once again having near him the son of his old friend, and, if the truth must be told, he no longer wished that Jean had become a doctor.

When the old Cure left his church after saying mass, when he saw coming along the road a great cloud of dust, when he felt the earth tremble under the rumbling cannon, he would stop, and, like a child, amuse himself with seeing the regiment pass, but to him the regiment was—­Jean.  It was this robust and manly cavalier, in whose face, as in an open book, one read uprightness, courage, and goodness.