In one of those letters--I feel proud to tell you of it my children--the general informed me that the Emperor himself had remembered me." "What, did he know you ?" "A little, I flatter myself--'Oh! Dagobert!' said he to your father, who was talking to him about me; 'a horse-grenadier of my old guard--a soldier of Egypt and Italy, battered with wounds--an old dare-devil, whom I decorated with my own hand at Wagram--I have not forgotten him!'-- I vow, children, when your mother read that to me, I cried like a fool." "The Emperor--what a fine golden face he has on the silver cross with the red ribbon that you would sometimes show us when we behaved well." "That cross--given by him--is my relic.

It is there in my knapsack, with whatever we have of value--our little purse and papers.

But, to return to your mother; it was a great consolation to her, when I took her letters from the general, or talked with her about him--for she suffered much--oh, so much! In vain her parents tormented and persecuted her; she always answered: 'I will never marry any one but General Simon.' A spirited woman, I can tell you--resigned, but wonderfully courageous.
One day she received a letter from the general; he had left the Isle of Elba with the Emperor; the war had again broken out, a short campaign, but as fierce as ever, and heightened by soldiers' devotion.

In that campaign of France; my children, especially at Montmirail, your father fought like a lion, and his division followed his example it was no longer valor--it was frenzy.

He told me that, in Champagne, the peasants killed so many of those Prussians, that their fields were manured with them for years.