"You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have been
drinking at his expense, you rascal?"
The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.
"Ingrate!" pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere;
"you would pawn your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat your
children, en fricassee! You would sell your father's bones for a draught
of brandy!"
The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquence
was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughs
at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared
forth a defiance.
"White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. He
kills women--he kills women with his lady's grace!"
"He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beat
them with a stick if they don't fry his eggs fast enough, as you do,
Barbe-Grise," retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of the
absent. "White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other
people's pockets as yours are!"
This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the
screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom
the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was
getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the
infinite glee of the whole ballroom.
"Dame!--his hands cannot work as mine can!" growled her opponent.
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