cousin of the captain, did the honors.  M. Violette immediately observed the young girl, seated under a “Bataille des Pyramides” with two swords crossed above it, a carnation in her hair.  It was in midsummer, and through the open window one could see the magnificent moonlight, which shone upon the esplanade and made the huge cannon shine.  They were playing charades, and when it came Lucie’s turn to be questioned among all the guests, M. Violette, to relieve her of her embarrassment, replied so awkwardly that they all exclaimed, “Now, then, that is cheating!” With what naive grace and bashful coquetry she served the tea, going from one table to another, cup in hand, followed by the one-armed captain with silver epaulets, carrying the plum-cake!  In order to see her again, M. Violette paid the captain visit after visit.  But the greater part of the time he saw only the old soldier, who told him of his victories and conquests, of the attack of the redoubt at Borodino, and the frightful swearing of the dashing Murat, King of Naples, as he urged the squadrons on to the rescue.  At last, one beautiful Sunday in autumn, he found himself alone with the young girl in the private garden of the veteran of the Old Guard.  He seated himself beside Lucie on a stone bench:  he told her his love, with the profound gaze of the Little Corporal, in bronzed plaster, resting upon them; and, full of delicious confusion, she replied, “Speak to mamma,” dropping her bewildered eyes and gazing at the bed of china-asters, whose boxwood border traced the form of a cross of the Legion of Honor.

And all this was effaced, lost forever!  The captain was dead; Lucie’s mother was dead, and Lucie herself, his beloved Lucie, was dead, after giving him six years of cloudless happiness.

Certainly, he would never marry again.  Oh, never!

No woman had ever existed or ever would exist for him but his poor darling, sleeping in the Montparnasse Cemetery, whose grave he visited every Sunday with a little watering-pot concealed under his coat.

He recalled, with a shiver of disgust, how, a few months after Lucie’s death, one stifling evening in July, he was seated upon a bench in the Luxembourg, listening to the drums beating a retreat under the trees, when a woman came and took a seat beside him and looked at him steadily.  Surprised by her significant look, he replied, to the question that she addressed to him, timidly and at the same time boldly:  “So this is the way that you take the air?” And when she ended by asking him, “Come to my house,” he had followed her.  But he had hardly entered when the past all came back to him, and he felt a stifled feeling of distress.  Falling into a chair, he sobbed, burying his face in his hands.  His grief was so violent that, by a feminine instinct of pity, the wretched creature took his head in her arms, saying, in a consoling tone, “There, cry, cry, it will do you good!” and rocked him like an infant.  At last he disengaged himself from this caress, which made him ashamed of himself, and throwing what little money he had about him upon the top of the bureau, he went away and returned to his home, where he went hastily to bed and wept to his heart’s content, as he gnawed his pillow.  Oh, horrible memories!