lieutenants, and of shiftlessly dawdling and
futile pavement beating on the part of
gaby-faced soldiers, not over clean, and
with an inch and a half of coarse cotton
shirt visible between the hem of their undress
jackets and the waistband of their
red pantaloons; much moustache twisting,
tin-canful of soup carrying, absinthe
tippling, and halfpenny cigar smoking; these
were the most salient features of French
military life, and they were as well known
to the majority of educated Englishmen as
the manners and customs of the metropolitan
police. But when Metz went mad
with the war fever early in August, 1870,
her military guise underwent a development
so extensive and so exceptional,
that the spectator of many strange scenes
in many strange countries may be
warranted in sketching the things he saw
without being open to the charge of telling
a thrice-told tale. To our breakfast-table
at the Hotel Chaos came officers—few of
them below the rank of captain—from every
branch of the French military service.
The Imperial Guard were the most
numerously represented; for at Metz were the
imperial head-quarters, and the Cent Gardes
mounted sentry at the Prefecture. Their
lieutenant did not condescend to breakfast
with us; but he frequently deigned to take
coffee and kirsch on the terrace. I see him
now, a sky-blue giant—I mean that his
tunic was sky-blue—with a fat, foolish
face. For the rest he was all epaulettes,
and jack-boots, and buckskins, and aiguillettes,
and buttons, and sword and sash,
and splendour generally. I used to reckon
him up, and calculate that at the lowest
valuation he could not be bought, as he
stood, for less than a hundred and fifty
pounds. His boots alone must have been
worth three pounds ten. I used, I own, to
envy him. To what surprising stroke of
good luck did he owe his commission in
the cream of the Prætorians; in the Golden
Guard of Cæsar? Had he been born to
greatness? had he achieved it? or had
greatness been thrust upon him in
consequence of his breadth of chest and length
of limb? What a position! Here was a
fortunate youth, obviously not more than
five-and-twenty years of age, who was privileged
to mount guard on Cæsar's stair-case,
and before the curtains of the alcoves
of the empress. He had been at all the
grand Tuileries balls; at all the state
ceremonies in the Great Hall of the Louvre, at
the imperial hunts at Foutainebleau and
Compeigne. The faces of half the kings
in Europe must have been familiar to him;
and as for princes, princesses, senators,
members of the Institute and Grands Croix
of the Legion of Honour, they must have
been to his sated vision the smallest of
small deer. Yet here was this ambrosial
creature—this happy combination of the
Apollo Belvedere and Shaw the Life Guardsman
—for I am sure that he was as brave
as he was beautiful—sipping his coffee and
kirsch, and smoking his cigar, as though
he had been an ordinary mortal. And,
—no; my olfactory nerves did not deceive
me: the cigar was a halfpenny one, a veritable
Petit Bordeaux of the Régie. What has
become of that gay and gallant Colossus
by this time? It is some satisfaction to
have the conviction that his corpse is not
entombed in some dreadful trench in the
blood-drenched fields of Alsace or Lorraine,
for the Cent Gardes did not fight. After
Sedan, the corps being abolished by a
hard-hearted republican government, these
sumptuous but expensive Janisaries retired
into private life. By the way, what became
of the real Turkish Janisaries? They
were not all massacred by the Sultan
Mahmoud; some few escaped. What
became of those Mamelukes who were not
cut to pieces by the troops of Mehemet
Ali? What would become of our Beef-
eaters, if a cruel House of Commons
declined to vote the miscellaneous estimate
necessary for their support? What
becomes of the supernumeraries when the
Italian Opera House closes—the men with
the large flat faces, sphinx-like in their
impassibility, the large hands, the larger
feet, and the legs on which the " tights"
are always in loose wrinkles, and which
are frequently bandy? There is a strange
faculty of absorption and engulfment in
life. There are whole races of people who
seem to "duck under," as it were, and
remain, quietly and comfortably submarine,
while the great ocean overhead moans and
struggles, or is lashed to frenzy in infinite
surges. Some of these days, perchance,
I shall meet a marker at billiards, or a
"putter-up" in a bowling alley, an
assistant at a hairdresser's, or a model in a
life school, who may casually mention the
fact that once upon a time he was a Cent
Garde. Why not? I met a Knight of
Malta in Spain, who was travelling in dry
sherries; and I have heard of an
ex-Dominican monk who at present follows
the lively profession of clown to a circus.
I have been aware of a baronet who earned
his living as a photographer, and an