"One would imagine I was just out of a convent, and weaving a marvelous
romance from a mystery and a tristesse, because the first soldier I
notice in Algeria has a gentleman's voice and is ill treated by his
officers!" she thought with a smile, while she opened the poems which
had that day arrived, radiant in the creamy vellum, the white velvet,
and the gold of a dedication copy, with the coronet of the Corona
d'Amague on their binding. The poems were sparkling with grace and
elegant silvery harmonies; but they served ill to chain her attention,
for while she read her eyes wandered at intervals to the chess
battalions.
"Such a man as that buried in the ranks of this brutalized army!"
she mused. "What fatal chance could bring him here? Misfortune, not
misconduct, surely. I wonder if Lyon could learn? He shall try."
"Your Chasseur has the air of a Prince, my love," said a voice behind
her.
"Equivocal compliment! A much better air than most Princes," said Mme.
Corona, glancing up with a slight shrug of her shoulders, as her guest
and traveling companion, the Marquise de Renardiere, entered.
"Indeed! I saw him as he passed out; and he saluted me as if he had been
a Marshal. Why did he come?"
Venetia Corona pointed to the Napoleons, and told the story; rather
listlessly and briefly.
"Ah! The man has been a gentleman, I dare say. So many of them come to
our army. I remember General Villefleur's telling me--he commanded
here a while--that the ranks of the Zephyrs and Zouaves were full of
well-born men, utterly good-for-nothing, the handsomest scoundrels
possible; who had every gift and every grace, and yet come to no better
end than a pistol-shot in a ditch or a mortal thrust from Bedouin steel.
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