The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the French army had
roused the sleeping lion in him, and made him as fine a soldier as ever
ranged under any flag. He had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved,
hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a
vividness that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless,
insouciant world of other days. It developed him into a magnificent
soldier--too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service he
had adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever lived
under any other flag than that tricolor which he followed and defended
now.
The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved over the gates
of Royallieu--"Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume"--verified itself in
his case. Outlawed, beggared, robbed at a stroke of every hope and
prospect--he had taken his adversity boldly by the beard, and had
made himself at once a country and a kingdom among the brave, fierce,
reckless, loyal hearts of the men who came from north, south, east, and
west--driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate--to fill up
the battalions of North Africa.
As he went now, in the warmth of the after-glow, he turned up into
the Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance of a narrow, dark,
tumble-down, picturesque shop, half like a stall of a Cairo bazaar; half
like a Jew's den in a Florentine alley.
A cunning, wizen head peered out at him from the gloom.
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