Physically, my eldest brother was tall, with a slight and exceptionally elegant figure.  In uniform and on horseback he looked magnificent, and his soldierly presence pleased the troops as much as it did the populace.  As for bravery, he was downright reckless, another cause for popularity with the masses.  Everybody knew he had received a wound in Africa, before Mascara, by throwing himself boldly among the skirmishers at a critical moment.  It was known, too, that at the Mouzaia Pass, when the whole army was wearing a cap covered with black oilcloth, he alone insisted on wearing a bright red one, which marked him out to all the men as their commanding officer, but which also exposed himself, and those near him as well, to the enemy’s bullets.  To the charm of valour my brother added that of speech, that music of the tongue to which all men, but especially Frenchmen, are so sensitive.  And to this he added another quality not less seductive, especially in a prince—­he was a good listener; listening, in fact, was one of his foremost qualities.  Surrounded, as he always was, by eminent men of every nationality, he would assimilate with extraordinary facility and wonderful retentiveness not only the fruitful ideas which he gleaned from their conversation, but the very words which struck his fancy.  And these words, as well as those with which his cultivated and thoroughly French mind and his heart inspired him, he knew how to use with marvellous effect.  What more eloquent than the toast he proposed at a farewell banquet in the open air, at which his whole division, officers and men alike, were gathered round him, after their return from the expedition to the Iron Gates?

“In the name of the King, who four times over has sent his son to serve in its ranks, I drink to the army of Africa and its general-in-chief, Marshal Vallee, under whose orders it has accomplished such great deeds.

“To the army which has conquered a vast and splendid empire for France, opening a boundless field to that civilisation of which it is the vanguard, and that colonisation of which it is the first pledge.

“To the army that has handled rifle and pick in turn, fighting Arabs or fever as they came, facing an inglorious death in hospital with stoic resignation, and which by its brilliant valour has preserved the most famous traditions of our arms among our youthful soldiers.

“To the army, the flower of that greater French army—­the nursery, on the one battlefield reserved to us alone, of our future military chiefs--whose heart swells with a just and noble pride in those who have already risen from its ranks.

“To the army, which, distant as it is from the fatherland, knows happily nothing of the intestine conflicts waged there, except to curse them, and which, being as it is the refuge of those who flee them, asks nothing but to fight nature, Arabs, and the climate, in the general interest of France.

“And to the illustrious leader, the captor of Constantine, who has stamped French Africa with the indelible seal of permanent possession, and planted our flag where the Romans dared not carry their eagles.”