olly
apathetic to their own exploits; and a display with a touch of
excitement in it had been witnessed a couple of months before on the
entry of the troops from the Crimea,[203] when the Zouaves, as they
marched past, pleased Dickens most. "A remarkable body of men," he
wrote, "wild, dangerous, and picturesque. Close-cropped head, red skull
cap, Greek jacket, full red petticoat trowsers trimmed with yellow, and
high white gaiters--the most sensible things for the purpose I know, and
coming into use in the line. A man with such things on his legs is
always free there, and ready for a muddy march; and might flounder
through roads two feet deep in mud, and, simply by changing his gaiters
(he has another pair in his haversack), be clean and comfortable and
wholesome again, directly. Plenty of beard and moustache, and the
musket carried reverse-wise with the stock over the shoulder, make up
the sunburnt Zouave. He strides like Bobadil, smoking as he goes; and
when he laughs (they were under my window for half-an-hour or so),
plunges backward in the wildest way, as if he were going to throw a
sommersault. They have a black dog belonging to the regiment, and, when
they now marched along with their medals, this dog marched after the one
non-commissioned officer he invariably follows with a profound
conviction that he was decorated. I couldn't see whether he had a medal,
his hair being long; but he was perfectly up to what had befallen his
regiment; and I never saw anything so capital as his way of regarding
the public. Whatever the regiment does, he is always in his place; and
it was impossible to mistake the air of modest triumph which was now
upon him. A small dog corporeally, but of a great mind."[204] On that
night there was an illumination in honour of the army, when the "whole
of Paris, bye streets and lanes and all sorts of out of the way places,
was most brilliantly illuminated. It looked in the dark like Venice and
Genoa rolled into one, and split up through the middle by the Corso at
Rome in the carnival time. The French people certainly do know how to
honour their own countrymen, in a most marvellous way." It was the
festival time of the New Year, and Dickens was fairly lost in a mystery
of amazement at where the money could come from that everybody was
spending on the etrennes they were giving to everybody else. All the
famous shops on the Boulevards had been blockaded for more than a week.
"There is now a line of w