“Did he have fine horses? He must have had fine horses!”
“On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a racing mare, perfectly white. Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful crupper. A little more than fifteen hands in height.”
“A pretty horse,” remarked the hairdresser.
“It was His Majesty’s beast.”
The hairdresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:—
“The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?”
The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who had been there:—
“In the heel. At Ratisbon. I never saw him so well dressed as on that day. He was as neat as a new sou.”
“And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?”
“I?” said the soldier, “ah! not to amount to anything. At Marengo, I received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jéna. At Friedland, a thrust from a bayonet, there—at the Moskowa seven or eight lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed one of my fingers. Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaïen in the thigh, that’s all.”
“How fine that is!” exclaimed the hairdresser, in Pindaric accents, “to die on the field of battle! On my word of honor, rather than die in bed, of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms, syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannonball in my belly!”