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Updated: June 24, 2025
"And in the mean time?" suggested the man who seemed but a shadow of someone standing apart and far away from the affairs of daily life. "In the mean time one must play one's part," returned D'Arragon, with his almost inaudible laugh, "whatever it may be." There was no foreboding in his voice; no second meaning in the words. He was open and simple and practical, like the life he led.
Others, again, told them that they were officers ordered to take up some new command in the retreating army. Beyond Konigsberg, however, D'Arragon and Barlasch found themselves alone on their eastward route. Every man's face was set towards the west. This was not an army at all, but an endless procession of tramps.
The roads, in summer almost impassable mere ruts across the plain are for the time ignored, and the traveller strikes a bee-line from place to place across a level of frozen snow. Louis d'Arragon had worked out a route across the plain, as he had been taught to shape a course across a chart. "How did you return from Kowno?" he asked Barlasch. "Name of my own nose," replied that traveller.
There was that in voice and attitude which his hearers had never noted before, although Charles had often evoked something approaching it. It seemed to indicate that, of all the people with whom they had seen their father hold intercourse, Louis d'Arragon was the only man who stood upon equality with him.
But you saw none of these things, mon capitaine?" "It was by that winding stream where a farm had been burnt," said Louis. Barlasch glanced at him sideways. "If we should come to that, mon capitaine...." "We won't." They trudged on in silence for some time. They were off the road now, and D'Arragon was steering by dead-reckoning.
"We have found a man here," wrote Louis d'Arragon, "who travelled as far as Vilna with Charles. There they parted. Charles, who was ordered to Warsaw on staff work, told his friend that you were in Dantzig, and that, foreseeing a siege of the city, he had written to you to join him at Warsaw. This letter has doubtless been lost.
It comes from Dantzig written by one whose name begins with 'B." "Barlasch," suggested D'Arragon quietly, as he took from his pocket a paper which he unfolded and held beneath the eyes of the cobbler. It was a passport written in three languages.
The King of Naples, to whom Napoleon gave the command of his broken army quite gaily "a vous, Roi de Naples," he is reported to have said, as he hurried to his carriage Murat abandoned his sick and wounded; did not even warn the stragglers. D'Arragon entered the city by the narrow gate known as the Town Gate, through which, as through that greater portal of Moscow, every man must pass bareheaded.
D'Arragon reached Kowno without mishap, and there found a Russian colonel of Cossacks who proved friendly enough, and not only appreciated the value of his passport and such letters of recommendation as he had been able to procure at Konigsberg, but gave him others, and forwarded him on his journey. He still nourished a lingering belief in De Casimir's word.
But for the most part they were not so scrupulous. At first D'Arragon, to whom these horrors were new, attempted to help such as appealed to him, but Barlasch laughed at him. "Yes," he said. "Take the medallion, and promise to send it to his mother. Holy Heaven they all have medallions, and they all have mothers. Every Frenchman remembers his mother when it is too late. I will get a cart.
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