Your squadrons would go to the devil after him." The Colonel gave a grim laugh.
"I dare say nobody knows the way better." Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking champagne by great glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping another's soup, pulling the limbs of a succulent ortolan to pieces with a relish, and devouring truffles with all the zest of a bon-vivant, did not lose a word, and catching the inflection of Chateauroy's voice, settled with her own thoughts that "Bel-a-faire-peur" was not a fair field or a smooth course with his Colonel.

The weather-cock heart of the little "Friend of the Flag" veered round, with her sex's common custom, to the side that was the weakest.
"Dieu de Dieu, M.le Colonel!" she cried, while she ate M.le Colonel's foie gras with as little ceremony and as much enjoyment as would be expected from a young plunderer accustomed to think a meal all the better spiced by being stolen "by the rules of war"-- "whatever else your handsome Corporal is, he is an aristocrat.

Ah, ha! I know the aristocrats--I do! Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and nonchalant.

Give me the aristocrats--the real thing, you know.

Not the ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being honest bread--but the old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur." The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had aimed at a sore point in him.