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Updated: June 28, 2025
"But there, la, la! many a time my wife, my good Florienne, said to me, 'Jose Jose Lajeunesse, with a chest like yours, you ought to be a corporal at least." Parpon beckoned to Lagroin, and nodded. "Corporal! corporal!" cried Lagroin; "in a week you shall be a lieutenant and a month shall make you a captain, and maybe better than that!"
"And Monsieur Valmond," said the charcoalman slyly. "And Monsieur the Emperor!" cried Lagroin almost savagely. He caught Parpon's eye, and instantly his hand went to his pocket. "Ah, he is a comrade, that! Nothing is too good for his friends, for his soldiers. See!" he added. He took from his pocket ten gold pieces.
Handing one to each, he poured them brimming full. Then, filling his own, he spilled a little in the steely dust of the smithy floor. All did the same, though they knew not why. "What's that for?" asked the mealman. "To show the Little Corporal, dear Corporal Violet, and my comrades of the Old Guard, that we don't forget them," cried Lagroin.
"Ay, thank the Lord, we've done well that way!" said the blacksmith, drawing himself up for he loved nothing better than to be called the giant, though he was known to many as petit enfant, in irony of his size. Lagroin was now impatient. He could not see the drift of this, and he was about to whisper to Parpon, when the little man sent him a look, commanding silence, and he fretted on dumbly.
When the gossip came to Lagroin, as he sat in his doorway, babbling of Grouchy and Lannes and Davoust, the Little Corporal outflanking them all in his praise, his dim blue eyes flared out from the distant sky of youth and memory, his lips pursed in anger, and he got to his feet, his stick fiercely pounding the ground. "Tut! tut!" said he. "A lie! a pretty lie!
With an eye for the grotesque, he had formed a company of jovial blades, called Kalathumpians, after the manner of the mimes of old times in his beloved Dauphiny. "All right, all right," he said, when Lagroin, in the half-lighted blacksmith shop, asked him to swear allegiance and service. "'Brigadier, vous avez raison," he added, quoting a well-known song. Then he hummed a little and coughed.
The children had been well rehearsed, for even as Valmond arrived upon the scene, Lagroin and Parpon on either side of him, the mock Valmond was bidding the drummer: "Play up the feet of the army!" The crowd parted on either side, silenced and awed by the look of potential purpose in the face of this yesterday's hero. The old sergeant's glance was full of fury, Parpon's of a devilish sort of glee.
"And Monsieur Valmond," said the charcoalman slyly. "And Monsieur the Emperor!" cried Lagroin almost savagely. He caught Parpon's eye, and instantly his hand went to his pocket. "Ah, he is a comrade, that! Nothing is too good for his friends, for his soldiers. See!" he added. He took from his pocket ten gold pieces.
I will ask for no further proof than did Sergeant Lagroin. It is in a small way yet, but you are playing a terrible game. Do you realise what may happen?" "In the hour that you ask a last proof I will give it," he said almost fiercely. "I go now to meet an enemy." "If I should change that enemy into a friend " she hinted. "Then I should have no need of stratagem or force."
He carried it through Ville Bambord, fifty miles away; and the story of how a Napoleon had come to Pontiac reached the ears of old Sergeant Eustache Lagroin of the Old Guard, who had fought with the Great Emperor at Waterloo, and in his army on twenty other battle-fields.
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