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Updated: June 15, 2025
She shook her head, then said below her breath: "I cannot sleep; I have been sitting in an easy-chair beside the colonel. He is very feverish; he awakes at every instant, almost, and then plies me with questions. I don't know how to answer them. Come in and see him, you." M. de Vineuil had fallen asleep again.
There was one corner, however, of the immense structure that was always closed, as if it had no occupant: it was the chamber that Colonel de Vineuil still continued to inhabit, at the extreme end of the suite where the master and his family spent their daily life.
A projectile of some description had carried away the heel of the foot-covering and forced the steel shank into the flesh. M. de Vineuil bent over his saddle and glanced unconcernedly at the member, in which the sensation at that time must have been far from pleasurable. "Yes, yes," he replied, "it is a little remembrance that I received a while ago.
"Who is going to die?" Colonel de Vineuil, sitting his tall horse, turned his head and gave a smile, the first that had been seen on his face that morning. Then he resumed his statue-like attitude, waiting for orders as impassively as ever under the tumbling shells.
He was clumsy enough to employ as a go-between in his courtship of his new mistress a certain gentleman named Vineuil, who was, it is true, one of his most skilful and attached followers, but whose good looks, agreeable and satirical wit, and enterprising character rendered him a very dangerous emissary among women. He had even acquired some celebrity through his successes in that way.
The latter quoted Latin in his conversation, while the other could scarcely read, but the two were well mated, as unprepossessing a pair as one could expect to meet in a summer's day. The camp was already astir; Jean and Maurice took the francs-tireurs to Captain Beaudoin, who conducted them to the quarters of Colonel Vineuil.
Just as he reached his door, however, his progress was arrested a moment by encountering Colonel de Vineuil, who, with his blood-stained boot, was being brought in for treatment in a condition of semi-consciousness, upon a bed of straw that had been prepared for him on the floor of a market-gardener's wagon.
A vision rose before Maurice's eyes that impressed him deeply; it was Colonel de Vineuil, who loomed suddenly from out the mist, sitting his horse, erect and motionless, at the intersection of two roads the man appearing of preternatural size, and so pale and rigid that he might have served a sculptor as a study for a statue of despair; the steed shivering in the raw, chill air of morning, his dilated nostrils turned in the direction of the distant firing.
Raising his eyes presently Maurice was startled to see Colonel de Vineuil sitting his big horse at no great distance, man and steed impassive and motionless as if carved from stone, patient were they under the leaden hail, with face turned toward the enemy.
That he had been able to employ the good offices of Colonel de Vineuil to afford him an opportunity of shaking hands with his brother-in-law was owing to the circumstance that that officer was own uncle to young Mme. Delaherche, a pretty young widow whom the cloth manufacturer had married the year previous, and whom Maurice and Henriette, thanks to their being neighbors, had known as a girl.
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