The Peasant and the Prince | Page 6

where she lives?"
"No, I think not. Whether Lisbon is in Germany, I am not certain; but I
don't think she and her mother were in the earthquake; but I know that
it happened the day she was born, and that it hurts her spirits to think of
it. She takes it for a sign that she will live unhappy, or die in some
dreadful way."
"You have not served out of France," observed Randolphe, as he came
up, with the third soldier, and seated himself on the bench. "You have
not seen either Lisbon or Germany, I suppose; for I can tell you that
Lisbon is a good way off from any place where this princess has been.
Well, I am sorry to hear anything hurts her spirits; but, to be sure, the
great earthquake was an awful thing."
"I am thinking," said Jerome, "that a good many thousand people must
have been born that same day; I hope they are not all troubled with bad
spirits. It would be a curious sight to see so many people of fifteen all
low about the manner of their lives and deaths."
"She is very low sometimes, however," observed his comrade. "When
she was leaving the city she lived in, she wept so that nothing was ever
seen like it. She covered her eyes sometimes with her handkerchief, and
sometimes with her hands; and looked out many times from the
coach-window, to see her mother's palace once more."
Everyone thought there was no great wonder in this. A young girl
leaving her own country for ever, to be the wife of a foreign prince
whom she had never seen, and could not tell whether she should like,
might well be in tears, Randolphe said. Had she cheered up yet?
"Yes, indeed," said Jerome, "that she has. When she saw the fine
pavilion on the frontier, she was pleased enough."

The boys wanted to hear about the pavilion.
"It was there," said Jerome, "that she was to be made a French princess
of. It was a very grand sort of tent, that cost more money than I can
reckon."
Randolphe sighed.
"There were three rooms," continued Jerome; "a large one in the middle,
and a smaller one at each end. In one of these smaller rooms she left
everything she had worn, even to her very stockings, and all her
German attendants; and then she went through to the other, where she
found her French attendants, and her fine French wardrobe."
"And shall we see her in some of her new clothes?" asked Marc.
"Certainly." And Jerome went on describing the princess's dress, and
told all he had heard of her jewels, and furs, and laces, till the soldiers
observed that their host had sighed very often. One of the soldiers then
said that it was enough to make poor men like themselves sad to hear of
such luxury, when they were hungry in the long summer days, and cold
all the long winter nights.
"What need you care?" said the host, somewhat bitterly. "You are
provided for by law, when we country people are ground down by it.
You come upon us, and must be served with the best, when we have
not enough for ourselves."
The third soldier declared that he thought this a very uncivil speech.
Jerome said that he, for his part, could dispense with civility in such a
case, when he happened to know where the truth lay. He assured
Randolphe that soldiers like himself were as little pleased with the state
of things as any countryman. They themselves were the sons of
peasants; and many had led a cottage life, and knew how to pity it. But
he must say, a soldier's life was very little better. The army could not
get its pay. Glad enough would soldiers be to save trouble to their hosts,
if they had a little money in their pockets; but pay was not to be got, in
these days, by soldiers, any more than if none was due to them.

His smoking comrade thought there must be an earthquake somewhere
in France, swallowing up all the money: for nobody could tell where it
all went to.
"How can you say that," said Randolphe, "when you think of the
numbers of idle people that are feeding upon those who work?--I hear
you, wife," he said, in answer to a warning cough from his wife within.
"It is no treason to say that in this land there are swarms of idle folk,
living upon the toil of us who work."
The guests declared that they were men of honour, who would be
ashamed to repay hospitality by reporting the conversation of their host.
Besides, nobody in France could question the feet. To say nothing of