Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming through the
entrance of the hospital, she had casually heard that Mme. la Princesse
Corona d'Amague had made a gift of singular munificence and mercy to
the invalid soldiers--a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would
brighten their long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princesse
might be she knew nothing; but the title was enough; she was a silver
pheasant--bah! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats--when they were of
the sex feminine. "An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle," she would
say, "but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peacock." Which was the
reason why she flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolence
imaginable, but took the part of "Marquise," of "Bel-a-faire-peur," and
of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings
under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word here and
a touch there,--tender, soft, and bright,--since, however ironic her
mood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay in
such sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the
narrow chink of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she came
most specially to visit--a bed on which was stretched the emaciated form
of a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god.
The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth were tight
clinched on lips white and parched; and his immense eyes, with the heavy
circles round them, were fastened on vacancy with the yearning misery
that gleams in the eyes of a Spanish bull when it is struck again and
again by the matador, and yet cannot die.
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