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"I'll take it, madame," responded pere Picot, "and some cognac with it." "Oh! parbleu! he takes everything," said Brigitte to the male domestic, and she told the latter to keep an eye on the old madman. When Brigitte returned to the salon she found that the Abbe Gondrin had become the centre of a great circle formed by nearly the whole company, and as she approached, she heard him say:
There it was that the pontooners saved the army, for the pontooners stood firm at their posts; it was there that Gondrin behaved like a hero, and he is the sole survivor of all the men who were dogged enough to stand in the river so as to build the bridges on which the army crossed over, and so escaped the Russians, who still respected the Grand Army on account of its past victories.
In the brief pause that followed, both the horsemen looked at the man before them, who seemed like a fragment of the wreck of great armies which Napoleon had filled with men of bronze sought out from among three generations. Gondrin was certainly a splendid specimen of that seemingly indestructible mass of men which might be cut to pieces but never gave way.
It was there that the army was saved by the pontoniers, who were firm at their post; and there that Gondrin sole survivor of the men who were bold enough to go into the water and build the bridges by which the army crossed that Gondrin, here present, admirably conducted himself, and saved us from the Russians, who, I must tell you, still respected the grand army, remembering its victories.
"My dear lady," said the Abbe Gondrin, addressing Brigitte, "you might be right if we were formed of matter only; and if, bound to our body, there were not a soul with instincts and appetites that must be satisfied.
Gondrin looks upon him as a very knowing fellow, and something of a wit; and whenever Goguelat talks about Napoleon, his comrade seems to understand what he is saying from the movement of his lips. If these two come over to it, and we can manage to see without being seen, I shall treat you to a view of the spectacle. But here we are, close to the ditch, and I do not see my friend the pontooner."
The Abbe Gondrin eagerly protested the joy with which, notwithstanding his own insufficiency, he would undertake to reply to the scruples of conscience in the young savant. After asking him for a place in his friendship, and telling him to come at certain hours for conversation, he asked him to read, as a first step, the "Thoughts" of Pascal.
M. le Marquis de Montespan, scion of the old house of Pardaillan de Gondrin, had preferred what he styled "my grace and beauty" to the most wealthy partis of France. He was himself possessed of wealth, and his fortune gave him every facility for maintaining at Court a position of advantage and distinction.
It was somewhat remarkable that the gravest member of the party, aided by Rabourdin, was the person who finally warmed up the atmosphere. The Abbe Gondrin, a man of a most refined and cultivated mind, had, like every pure and well-ordered soul, a fund of gentle gaiety which he was well able to communicate, and liveliness was beginning to dawn upon the party when Minard entered the room.
The doctor and the commandant looked everywhere about them; Gondrin's soldier's coat lay there beside a heap of black mud, and his wheelbarrow, spade, and pickaxe were visible, but there was no sign of the man himself along the various pebbly watercourses, for the wayward mountain streams had hollowed out channels that were almost overgrown with low bushes. "He cannot be so very far away. Gondrin!
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