While he was making these reflections and saying to himself: “I must not forget that I am called Boulot, or lookout for the prison fate threatens me with,” the corporal and the cantinière had been exchanging a few words with regard to him.
“Don’t say I’m inquisitive,” said the cantinière, ceasing to address him in the second person singular, “it’s for your good I ask you these questions. Who are you, now, really?”
Fabrizio did not reply at first. He was considering that never again would he find more devoted friends to ask for advice, and he was in urgent need of advice from someone. “We are coming into a fortified place, the governor will want to know who I am, and ware prison if I let him see by my answers that I know nobody in the 4th Hussar Regiment whose uniform I am wearing!” In his capacity as an Austrian subject, Fabrizio knew all about the importance to be attached to a passport. Various members of his family, although noble and devout, although supporters of the winning side, had been in trouble a score of times over their passports; he was therefore not in the least put out by the question which the cantinière had addressed to him. But as, before answering, he had to think of the French words which would express his meaning most clearly, the cantinière, pricked by a keen curiosity, added, to induce him to speak: “Corporal Aubry and I are going to give you some good advice.”
“I have no doubt you are,” replied Fabrizio. “My name is Vasi and I come from Genoa; my sister, who is famous for her beauty, is married to a captain. As I am only seventeen, she made me come to her to let me see something of France, and form my character a little; not finding her in Paris, and knowing that she was with this army, I came on here. I’ve searched for her everywhere and haven’t found her. The soldiers, who were puzzled by my accent, had me arrested. I had money then, I gave some to the gendarme, who let me have some marching orders and a uniform, and said to me: ‘Get away with you, and swear you’ll never mention my name.’
“What was he called?” asked the cantinière.
“I’ve given my word,” said Fabrizio.
“He’s right,” put in the corporal, “the gendarme is a sweep, but our friend ought not to give his name. And what is the other one called, this captain, your sister’s husband? If we knew his name, we could try to find him.”
“Teulier, Captain in the 4th Hussars,” replied our hero.
“And so,” said the corporal, with a certain subtlety, “from your foreign accent the soldiers took you for a spy?”
“That’s the abominable word!” cried Fabrizio, his eyes blazing. “I who love the Emperor so and the French people! And it was that insult that annoyed me more than anything.”
“There’s no insult about it; that’s where you’re wrong; the soldiers’ mistake was quite natural,” replied Corporal Aubry gravely.
And he went on to explain in the most pedantic manner that in the army one must belong to some corps and wear a uniform, failing which it was quite simple that people should take one for a spy. “The enemy sends us any number of them; everybody’s a traitor in this war.” The scales fell from Fabrizio’s eyes; he realised for the first time that he had been in the wrong in everything that had happened to him during the last two months.
“But make the boy tell us the whole story,” said the cantinière, her curiosity more and more excited. Fabrizio obeyed. When he had finished:
“It comes to this,” said the cantinière, speaking in a serious tone to the corporal, “this child is not a soldier at all; we’re going to have a bloody war now that we’ve been beaten and betrayed. Why should he go and get his bones broken free, gratis and for nothing?”
“Especially,” put in the corporal, “as he doesn’t even know how to load his musket, neither by numbers, nor in his own time. It was I put in the shot that brought down the Prussian.”
“Besides, he lets everyone see the colour of his money,” added the cantinière; “he will be robbed of all he has as soon as he hasn’t got us to look after him.”
“The first cavalry noncom he comes across,” said the corporal, “will take it from him to pay for his drink, and perhaps they’ll enlist him for the enemy; they’re all traitors. The first man he meets will order him to follow, and he’ll follow him; he would do better to join our Regiment.”
“No, please, if you don’t mind, corporal!” Fabrizio exclaimed with animation; “I am more comfortable on a horse. And, besides, I don’t know how to load a musket, and you have seen that I can manage a horse.”
Fabrizio was extremely proud of this little speech. We need not report the long discussion that followed between the corporal and the cantinière as to his future destiny. Fabrizio noticed that in discussing him these people repeated three or four times all the circumstances of his story: the soldiers’ suspicions, the gendarme selling him marching orders and a uniform, the accident by which, the day before, he had found himself forming part of the Marshal’s escort, the glimpse of the Emperor as he galloped past, the horse that had been scoffed from him, and so on indefinitely.
With feminine curiosity the cantinière kept harking back incessantly to the way in which he had been dispossessed of the good horse which she had made him buy.
“You felt yourself seized by the feet, they lifted you gently over your horse’s tail, and sat you down on the ground!”
“Why repeat so often,” Fabrizio said to himself, “what all three of us
