“I have no doubt these are the people,” said the gen-d’arme; “and here is the ‘carte descriptive.’  Let us compare it—­’Forty-two or forty-three years of age.’”

“I trust, M. le Maire,” said I, overhearing this, “that ladies do not recognize me as so much.”

“Of a pale and cadaverous aspect,” continued the gen-d’arme.

Upon this the old functionary, wiping his spectacles with a snuffy handkerchief, as if preparing them to examine an eclipse of the sun, regarded me fixedly for several minutes, and said—­“Oh, yes, I perceive it plainly; continue the description.”

“Five feet three inches,” said the gen-d’arme.

“Six feet one in England, whatever this climate may have done since.”

“Speaks broken and bad French.”

“Like a native,” said I; “at least so said my friends in the chaussee D’Antin, in the year fifteen.”

Here the catalogue ended, and a short conference between the maire and the gen-d’arme ensued, which ended in our being committed for examination on the morrow; meanwhile we were to remain at the inn, under the surveillance of the gen-d’arme.

On reaching the inn my poor friend was so completely exhausted that she at once retired to her room, and I proceeded to fulfil a promise I had made her to despatch a note to Mrs. Bingham at Amiens by a special messenger, acquainting her with all our mishaps, and requesting her to come or send to our assistance.  This done, and a good supper smoking before me, of which with difficulty I persuaded Isabella to partake in her own room, I again regained my equanimity, and felt once more at ease.

The gen-d’arme in whose guardianship I had been left was a fine specimen of his caste; a large and powerfully built man of about fifty, with an enormous beard of grizzly brown and grey hair, meeting above and beneath his nether lip; his eyebrows were heavy and beetling, and nearly concealed his sharp grey eyes, while a deep sabre-wound had left upon his cheek a long white scar, giving a most warlike and ferocious look to his features.

As he sat apart from me for some time, silent and motionless, I could not help imagining in how many a hard-fought day he had borne a part, for he evidently, from his age and bearing, had been one of the soldiers of the empire.  I invited him to partake of my bottle of Medoc, by which he seemed flattered.  When the flask became low, and was replaced by another, he appeared to have lost much of his constrained air, and seemed forgetting rapidly the suspicious circumstances which he supposed attached to me—­waxed wondrous confidential and communicative, and condescended to impart some traits of a life which was not without its vicissitudes, for he had been, as I suspected, one of the “Guarde”—­the old guarde—­was wounded at Marengo, and received the croix d’honneur in the field of Wagram, from the hands of the Emperor himself.  The headlong enthusiasm of attachment to Napoleon, which his brief