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Updated: June 4, 2025
"Ah!" cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, "how that reminds me of my dear, dear mother." "Which?" said I, eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle's "Madonna" and another of "The Brigand's Wife." Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my reluctance. "You loved your mother, then?" said I, after a pause. "Yes, as a whelp may a tigress."
Fancy a little imp of six or seven years old dressed in little blue jacket, bright-yellow leather breeches, blue stockings, sheepskin sandals on his little bits of feet, and long bright flaxen curls streaming down from under a gayly-ribboned brigand's hat!
"Just what I was about to ask you," returned the stranger, lightly. "Whence come you?" "Precisely the question I was going to put." The brigand's colour came and he grew vicious. "If you are wise, you'll not try to fool me," he said. "If you have any wit," retorted the new-comer, "you'll not come pestering me with questions; I'm not in the humour, and when I am put out, I'm dangerous.
Crimes are only glorious during the first moment; they fade quickly. This kind of success lacks permanency; it is necessary promptly to supplement it with something else. At the Elysée a literary ornament was wanted. A little savor of the Academy is not out of place in a brigand's cavern. M. Mérimée was available. It was his destiny to sign himself "the Empress's Jester."
Yes; I can understand Medea. Fancy a woman of superlative beauty, of the highest courage and calmness, a woman of many resources, of genius, brought up by a petty princelet of a father, upon Tacitus and Sallust, and the tales of the great Malatestas, of Caesar Borgia and such-like! a woman whose one passion is conquest and empire fancy her, on the eve of being wedded to a man of the power of the Duke of Stimigliano, claimed, carried off by a small fry of a Pico, locked up in his hereditary brigand's castle, and having to receive the young fool's red-hot love as an honor and a necessity!
When I had crawled out of the vault through the brigand's hole of entrance when my heart had bounded with glad anticipations never to be realized when I had believed in the worth of love and friendship when I had seen the morning sun glittering on the sea, and had thought poor fool! that his long beams were like so many golden flags of joy hung up in heaven to symbolize the happiness of my release from death and my restoration to liberty then then I had heard a sailor's voice in the distance singing that "ritornello," and I had fondly imagined its impassioned lines were all for me!
And then what does he care whether the brigand's name is Count 'd'Artigas or Ker Karraje? Is not he, Thomas Roch, master of Back Cup? Is he not the owner of these riches accumulated by twenty years of murder and rapine? Disarmed before such moral degeneracy, knowing not how I can touch his ulcerated, irresponsible heart, I turn towards the door. It only remains for me to withdraw.
The wine merchant, Jean Picot, the principal personage in the late event, recognizing at first sight by his dress, weapons, mask, one of the men who had stopped the coach on the preceding day, was at first sight stupefied, then little by little, as he grasped the purport of this mysterious brigand's visit to him, he had passed from stupefaction to joy, through the intermediate phases separating these two emotions.
He kicked the steward in the face two or three times, and Guiton, his countenance all blood, black in the moonlight, embraced the brigand's and wept. Presently Cazaio slowly drove his sword into the back of the prostrate man, who shrieked, "O Jesu!" and began to cough and choke. Five times Cazaio spitted the writhing thing, and afterward was Guiton's soul released from the tortured body.
In all, each movement had the comely precision of finely adjusted clockwork, though at times John Bulmer's face showed a spurt of amusement roused by the brigand's extravagancy of gesture and Cazaio's contortions as he strove to pass the line of steel that flickered cannily between his sword and John Bulmer's portly bosom. Then John Bulmer, too, attacked.
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