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Updated: May 18, 2025
On the surface it seemed as though never was there a life more utterly thrown away than the life of a Guardsman and a gentleman, a man of good blood, high rank, and talented gifts had he ever chosen to make anything of them buried in the ranks of the Franco-African army; risking a nameless grave in the sand with almost every hour, associated with the roughest riffraff of Europe, liable any day to be slain by the slash of an Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years' splendid service by the distinctive badge of a corporal.
Now, "the little fagot of opposites," as Cecil had called her, put this skill into active use. The tent had been a scullion's tent; the poor marmiton had been killed, and lay outside, with his head clean severed by an Arab flissa; his fire had gone out, but his brass pots and pans, his jar of fresh water, and his various preparations for the General's dinner were still there.
And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour.
He listened, amused with her boastful supremacy; but the last words touched him with a certain pang just in that moment. He felt like a slave a slave who must obey his tyrant, or go out and die like a dog. "Well, yes," he said slowly; "I am a slave, I fear. I wish a Bedouin flissa would cut my thralls in two."
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