reaches perfection,
may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of Adrian, is the
type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity--taking it, like
many another youth, for a vocation--on the red cloth of war. On his
way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton. The pair became
intimate, partly from the contrasts in their characters; they drank from
the same cup at the wayside torrents, broke the same biscuit, and were
both made sergeants at the peace which followed the battle of Marengo.

When the war recommenced, Charles Mignon was promoted into the cavalry
and lost sight of his comrade. In 1812 the last of the Mignon de La
Bastie was an officer of the Legion of honor and major of a regiment
of cavalry. Taken prisoner by the Russians he was sent, like so
many others, to Siberia. He made the journey in company with another
prisoner, a poor lieutenant, in whom he recognized his old friend Jean
Dumay, brave, neglected, undecorated, unhappy, like a million of other
woollen epaulets, rank and file--that canvas of men on which
Napoleon painted the picture of the Empire. While in Siberia, the
lieutenant-colonel, to kill time, taught writing and arithmetic to the
Breton, whose early education had seemed a useless waste of time to Pere
Scevola. Charles found in the old comrade of his marching days one of
those rare hearts into which a man can pour his griefs while telling his
joys.

The young Provencal had met the fate which attends all handsome
bachelors. In 1804, at Frankfort on the Main, he was adored by Bettina
Wallenrod, only daughter of a banker, and he married her with all the
more enthusiasm because she was rich and a noted beauty, while he was
only a lieutenant with no prospects but the extremely problematical
future of a soldier of fortune of that day. Old Wallenrod, a decayed
German baron (there is always a baron in a German bank) delighted to
know that the handsome lieutenant was the sole representative of the
Mignon de La Bastie, approved the love of the blonde Bettina, whose
beauty an artist (at that time there really was one in Frankfort) had
lately painted as an ideal head of Germany. Wallenrod invested enough
money in the French funds to give his daughter thirty thousand francs a
year, and settled it on his anticipated grandsons, naming them counts of
La Bastie-Wallenrod. This "dot" made only a small hole in his cash-box,
the value of money being then very low. But the Empire, pursui