It was a racing mare, perfectly white.
Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful crupper.
A little more than fifteen hands in height.”
“A pretty horse,” remarked the hair-dresser.
“It was His Majesty’s beast.”
The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:—
“The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?”
The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who had been there:—
“In the heel.
At Ratisbon.
I never saw him so well dressed as on that day.
He was as neat as a new sou.”
“And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?”
“I?” said the soldier, “ah! not to amount to anything.
At Marengo, I received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland, a thrust from a bayonet, there,—at the Moskowa seven or eight lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed one of my fingers.
Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaien in the thigh, that’s all.”
“How fine that is!” exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, “to die on the field of battle! On my word of honor, rather than die in bed, of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms, syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my belly!”
“You’re not over fastidious,” said the soldier.
He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop.
The show-window had suddenly been fractured.
The wig-maker turned pale.
“Ah, good God!” he exclaimed, “it’s one of them!”
“What?”
“A cannon-ball.”
“Here it is,” said the soldier. And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor.
It was a pebble.
The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean.
As he passed the hair-dresser’s shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind, had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had flung a stone through his panes.
“You see!” shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue, “that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it.
What has any one done to that gamin?”
CHAPTER IV—THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN
In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had already been disarmed, Gavroche had just “effected a junction” with a band led by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly.
They were armed after a fashion.
Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the group.
Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt, two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched at their head shouting:
“Long live Poland!”
They reached the Quai Morland. Cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked by the rain, with lightning in their eyes.
Gavroche accosted them calmly:—
“Where are we going?”
“Come along,” said Courfeyrac.
Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was like a fish in water in a riot.
He wore a scarlet waistcoat, and indulged in the sort of words which break everything.
His waistcoat astounded a passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:—
“Here are the reds!”
“The reds, the reds!” retorted Bahorel.
“A queer kind of fear, bourgeois.
For my part I don’t tremble before a poppy, the little red hat inspires me with no alarm.
Take my advice, bourgeois, let’s leave fear of the red to horned cattle.”
He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his “flock.”
Bahorel exclaimed:— “‘Flock’; a polite way of saying geese.”