It
was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.
All her heart was in it--that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawk
and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child,
which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes,
with which she laced her dashing little uniform.
In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soil
under African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia,
in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in the
earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full of
black-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of the
Marseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves,
Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life
seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of her
little brigand's soul seemed to have found their utterance in those
tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touch
the earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave it
afresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.
So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She had a famous
group of spectators, not one of whom knew how to hold himself back
from springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down the
floor. But it had been often told them by experience that, unless she
beckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her
impromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result.
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