I dare say your Corporal is one of them."
"It may be so."
"But you doubt it, I imagine."
"I am not sure now that I do. But this person is certainly unlike a man
to whom disgrace has ever attached."
"You think your protege, then, has become what he is through adversity,
I suppose? Very interesting!"
"I really can tell you nothing of his antecedents. Through his skill at
sculpture, and my notice of it, considerable indignity has been brought
upon him; and a soldier can feel, it seems, though it is very absurd
that he should! That is all my concern with the matter, except that
I have to teach his commander not to play with my name in his barrack
yard."
She spoke with that negligence which always sounded very cold, though
the words were so gently spoken. Her best and most familiar friends
always knew when, with that courtly chillness, she had signed them their
line of demarcation.
And the Marquise de Renardiere said no more, but talked of the
Ambassador's poems.
CHAPTER XXV.
"LE BON ZIG."
Meanwhile the subject of their first discourse returned to the Chambree.
He had encouraged the men to pursue those various industries and
ingenuities, which, though they are affectedly considered against
"discipline," formed, as he knew well, the best preservative from real
insubordination, and the best instrument in humanizing and ameliorating
the condition of his comrades. The habit of application alone was
something gained; and if it kept them only for a while from the haunts
of those coarsest debaucheries which are the only possible form in which
the soldier can pursue the forbidden license of vice, it was better
than that leisure should be spent in that joyless bestiality which made
Cecil, once used to every refinement of luxury and indulgence, sicken
with a pitying wonder for those who found in it the only shape they knew
of "pleasure.
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