d the frontier of France under the Republic, and
had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,
Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who
had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that
same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray
before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his
sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade
blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks,
in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of
twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a
smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done
everything for France and nothing against her.

He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had
struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself
brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast
to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that
he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle,
and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the
street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!

He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he
was about to fall. Then he shuddered.

He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a
second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said to
himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape from
him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus fled, it
was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the future;
that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of the
gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through cellar-windows,
blows given and received in the rear; it was because, coming from
Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de la
Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father, it
did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that sword
were there, if after taking possession of it at his father's pillow,
he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of darkness
between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his
hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel!
He told himself that