Ten Tales | Page 3

in France we
may gain much. From the British fiction of this last quarter of the
nineteenth century little can be learned by any one--less by us
Americans in whom the English tradition is still dominant. When we
look to France for an exemplar we may find a model of value, but when
we copy an Englishman we are but echoing our own faults. "The truth
is," said Mr. Lowell in his memorable essay On a Certain
Condescension in Foreigners--"the truth is that we are worth nothing
except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism."
BRANDER MATTHEWS.

THE CAPTAIN'S VICES.
[Illustration: THE CAPTAIN'S VICES]

I.
It is of no importance, the name of the little provincial city where
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--installed himself when he was retired on a pension.
It was quite like all those other little villages which solicit without
obtaining it a branch of the railway; just as if it were not the sole
dissipation of the natives to go every day, at the same hour, to the Place
de la Fontaine to see the diligence come in at full gallop, with its gay
cracking of the whips and clang of bells.
It was a place of three thousand inhabitants--ambitiously denominated
souls in the statistical tables--and was exceedingly proud of its title of
chief city of the canton. It had ramparts planted with trees, a pretty river
with good fishing, a church of the charming epoch of the flamboyant
Gothic, disgraced by a frightful station of the cross, brought directly
from the quarter of Saint Sulpice. Every Monday its market was gay
with great red and blue umbrellas, and countrymen filled its streets in
carts and carriages. But for the rest of the week it retired with delight
into that silence and solitude which made it so dear to its rustic
population. Its streets were paved with cobble-stones; through the
windows of the ground-floor one could see samplers and wax-flowers
under glass domes, and, through the gates of the gardens, statuettes of
Napoleon in shell-work. The principal inn was naturally called the
Shield of France; and the town-clerk made rhymed acrostics for the
ladies of society.
Captain Mercadier had chosen that place of retreat for the simple
reason that he had been born there, and because, in his noisy childhood,
he had pulled down the signs and plugged up the bell-buttons. He
returned there to find neither relations, nor friends, nor acquaintances;
and the recollections of his youth recalled only the angry faces of
shop-keepers who shook their fists at him from the shop-doors, a
catechism which threatened him with hell, a school which predicted the
scaffold, and, finally, his departure for his regiment, hastened by a
paternal malediction.

For the Captain was not a saintly man; the old record of his punishment
was black with days in the guard-house inflicted for breaches of
discipline, absences from roll-calls, and nocturnal uproars in the
mess-room. He had often narrowly escaped losing his stripes as a
corporal or a sergeant, and he needed all the chance, all the license of a
campaigning life to gain his first epaulet. Firm and brave soldier, he
had passed almost all his life in Algiers at that time when our foot
soldiers wore the high shako, white shoulder-belts and huge
cartridge-boxes. He had had Lamoricière for commander. The Due de
Nemours, near whom he received his first wound, had decorated him,
and when he was sergeant-major, Père Bugrand had called him by his
name and pulled his ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el-Kader,
bearing the scar of a yataghan stroke on his neck, of one ball in his
shoulder and another in his chest; and notwithstanding absinthe, duels,
debts of play, and almond-eyed Jewesses, he fairly won, with the point
of the bayonet and sabre, his grade of captain in the First Regiment of
Sharp-shooters.
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--had just retired on his pension, not quite two
thousand francs, which, joined to the two hundred and fifty francs from
his cross, placed him in that estate of honorable penury which the State
reserves for its old servants.
His entry into his natal city was without ostentation. He arrived one
morning on the imperiale of the diligence, chewing an extinguished
cigar, and already on good terms with the conductor, to whom, during
his journey, he had related the passage of the Porte de Fer; full of
indulgence, moreover, for the distractions of his auditor, who often
interrupted the recital by some oath or epithet addressed to the off mare.
When the diligence stopped he threw on the sidewalk his old valise,
covered with railway placards as numerous as the changes of garrison
that its proprietor had made, and the