By how much I love my
own honour, by so much I will take care to protect yours. We are
but fraternising at the outposts, as soldiers do. When the bugle
calls, my boy, we must face each other, one for England, one for
France, and may God defend the right!'
So I spoke at the moment; but for all my brave airs, the boy had
wounded me in a vital quarter. His words continued to ring in my
hearing. There was no remission all day of my remorseful thoughts;
and that night (which we lay at Lichfield, I believe) there was no
sleep for me in my bed. I put out the candle and lay down with a
good resolution; and in a moment all was light about me like a
theatre, and I saw myself upon the stage of it playing ignoble
parts. I remembered France and my Emperor, now depending on the
arbitrament of war, bent down, fighting on their knees and with
their teeth against so many and such various assailants. And I
burned with shame to be here in England, cherishing an English
fortune, pursuing an English mistress, and not there, to handle a
musket in my native fields, and to manure them with my body if I
fell. I remembered that I belonged to France. All my fathers had
fought for her, and some had died; the voice in my throat, the
sight of my eyes, the tears that now sprang there, the whole man of
me, was fashioned of French earth and born of a French mother; I
had been tended and caressed by a succession of the daughters of
France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; and I had fought and
conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons.
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