He kept his
temper wonderfully; he always tries to preserve order; you can't say so
much of your riff-raff, Captain Vireflau, commonly! Here! this is his
horse. Send some men to him; and mind the thing is reported fairly, and
to his credit, to-morrow."
With which command, given as with the air of a commander-in-chief, in
its hauteur and its nonchalance, Cigarette vaulted off the charger,
flung the bridle to a soldier, and was away and out of sight before
Francois Vireflau had time to consider whether he should laugh at her
caprices, as all the army did, or resent her insolence to his dignity.
But he was a good-natured man, and, what was better, a just one; and
Cigarette had judged rightly that the tale she had told would weigh well
with him to the credit side of his Corporal, and would not reach his
Colonel in any warped version that could give pretext for any fresh
exercise of tyranny over "Bel-a-faire-peur" under the title of
"discipline."
"Dieu de Dieu!" thought his champion as she made her way through the
gas-lit streets. "I swore to have my vengeance on him. It is a droll
vengeance, to save his life, and plead his cause with Vireflau! No
matter! One could not look on and let a set of Arbicos kill a good
lascar of France; and the thing that is just must be said, let it go as
it will against one's grain. Public Welfare before Private Pique!"
A grand and misty generality which consoled Cigarette for an abandonment
of her sworn revenge which she felt was a weakness utterly unworthy
of her, and too much like that inconsequent weathercock, that useless,
insignificant part of creation, those objects of her supreme derision
and contempt, those frivolous trifles which she wondered the good God
had ever troubled himself to make--namely, "Les Femmes.
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