things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check tongues, and legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public discussion. When a young man of twenty-two, like the one named Georges, is clever and lively, he is much tempted, especially under circumstances like the present, to abuse those qualities.
In the first place, Georges had soon decided that he was the superior human being of the party there assembled. He saw in the count a manufacturer of the second-class, whom he took, for some unknown reason, to be a chandler; in the shabby young man accompanied by Mistigris, a fellow of no account; in Oscar a ninny, and in Pere Leger, the fat farmer, an excellent subject to hoax. Having thus looked over the ground, he resolved to amuse himself at the expense of such companions.
“Let me see,” he thought to himself, as the coucou went down the hill from La Chapelle to the plain of Saint-Denis, “shall I pass myself off for Etienne or Beranger? No, these idiots don’t know who they are. Carbonaro? the deuce! I might get myself arrested. Suppose I say I’m the son of Marshal Ney? Pooh! what could I tell them? — about the execution of my father? It wouldn’t be funny. Better be a disguised Russian prince and make them swallow a lot of stuff about the Emperor Alexander. Or I might be Cousin, and talk philosophy; oh, couldn’t I perplex ‘em! But no, that shabby fellow with the tousled head looks to me as if he had jogged his way through the Sorbonne. What a pity! I can mimic an Englishman so perfectly I might have pretended to be Lord Byron, travelling incognito. Sapristi! I’ll command the troops of Ali, pacha of Janina!”
During this mental monologue, the coucou rolled through clouds of dust rising on either side of it from that much travelled road.
“What dust!” cried Mistigris.
“Henry IV. is dead!” retorted his master. “If you’d say it was scented with vanilla that would be emitting a new opinion.”
“You think you’re witty,” replied Mistigris. “Well, it is like vanilla at times.”
“In the Levant — ” said Georges, with the air of beginning a story.
“‘Ex Oriente flux,’” remarked Mistigris’s master, interrupting the speaker.
“I said in the Levant, from which I have just returned,” continued Georges, “the dust smells very good; but here it smells of nothing, except in some old dust-barrel like this.”
“Has monsieur lately returned from the Levant?” said Mistigris, maliciously. “He isn’t much tanned by the sun.”
“Oh! I’ve just left my bed after an illness of three months, from the germ, so the doctors said, of suppressed plague.”
“Have you had the plague?” cried the count, with a gesture of alarm. “Pierrotin, stop!”
“Go on, Pierrotin,” said Mistigris. “Didn’t you hear him say it was inward, his plague?” added the rapin, talking back to Monsieur de Serizy. “It isn’t catching; it only comes out in conversation.”
“Mistigris! if you interfere again I’ll have you put off into the road,” said his master. “And so,” he added, turning to Georges, “monsieur has been to the East?”
“Yes, monsieur; first to Egypt, then to Greece, where I served under Ali, pacha of Janina, with whom I had a terrible quarrel. There’s no enduring those climates long; besides, the emotions of all kinds in Oriental life have disorganized my liver.”
“What, have you served as a soldier?” asked the fat farmer. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine,” replied Georges, whereupon all the passengers looked at him. “At eighteen I enlisted as a private for the famous campaign of 1813; but I was present at only one battle, that of Hanau, where I was promoted sergeant-major. In France, at Montereau, I won the rank of sub-lieutenant, and was decorated by, — there are no informers here, I’m sure, — by the Emperor.”
“What! are you decorated?” cried Oscar. “Why don’t you wear your cross?”
“The cross of ‘ceux-ci’? No, thank you! Besides, what man of any breeding would wear his decorations in travelling? There’s monsieur,” he said, motioning to the Comte de Serizy. “I’ll bet whatever you like — ”
“Betting whatever you like means, in France, betting nothing at all,” said Mistigris’s master.
“I’ll bet whatever you like,” repeated Georges, incisively, “that monsieur here is covered with stars.”
“Well,” said the count, laughing, “I have the grand cross of the Legion of honor, that of Saint Andrew of Russia, that of the Prussian Eagle, that of the Annunciation of Sardinia, and the Golden Fleece.”
“Beg pardon,” said Mistigris, “are they all in the coucou?”
“Hey! that brick-colored old fellow goes it strong!” whispered Georges to Oscar. “What was I saying? — oh! I know. I don’t deny that I adore the Emperor — ”
“I served under him,” said the count.
“What a man he was, wasn’t he?” cried Georges.
“A man to whom I owe many obligations,” replied the count, with a silly expression that was admirably assumed.
“For all those crosses?” inquired Mistigris.
“And what quantities of snuff he took!” continued Monsieur de Serizy.
“He carried it loose in his pockets,” said Georges.
“So I’ve been told,” remarked Pere Leger with an incredulous look.
“Worse than that; he chewed and smoked,” continued Georges. “I saw him smoking, in a queer way, too, at Waterloo, when Marshal Soult took him round the waist and flung him into his carriage, just as he had seized a musket and was going to charge the English — ”
“You were at Waterloo!” cried Oscar, his eyes stretching wide open.
“Yes, young man, I did the campaign of 1815. I was a captain at Mont-Saint-Jean, and I retired to the Loire, after we were all disbanded. Faith! I was disgusted with France; I couldn’t stand it. In fact, I should certainly have got myself arrested; so off I went, with two or three dashing fellows, — Selves, Besson, and others, who are now in Egypt, — and we entered the service of pacha Mohammed; a queer sort of fellow he was, too! Once a tobacco merchant in the bazaars, he is now on the high-road to be a sovereign prince. You’ve all seen him in that picture by Horace Vernet, — ’The Massacre of the Mameluks.’ What a handsome fellow he was! But I wouldn’t give up the religion of my fathers and embrace Islamism; all the more because the abjuration required a surgical operation which I hadn’t any fancy for. Besides, nobody respects a renegade. Now if they had offered me a hundred thousand francs a year, perhaps — and yet, no! The pacha did give me a thousand talari as a present.”
“How much is that?” asked Oscar, who was listening to Georges with all his ears.
“Oh! not much. A talaro is, as you might say, a five-franc piece. But faith! I got no compensation for the vices I contracted in that God-forsaken country, if country it is. I can’t live now without smoking a narghile twice a-day, and that’s very costly.”
“How did you find Egypt?” asked the count.
“Egypt? Oh! Egypt is all sand,” replied Georges, by no means taken aback. “There’s nothing green but the valley of the Nile. Draw a green line down a sheet of yellow paper, and you have Egypt. But those Egyptians — fellahs they are called — have an immense advantage over us. There are no gendarmes in that country. You may go from end to end of Egypt, and you won’t see one.”
“But I suppose there are a good many Egyptians,” said Mistigris.
“Not as many as you think for,” replied Georges. “There are many more Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs. But all that kind of animal is very