In his old world he would have lounged listlessly through fashionable seasons, and in an atmosphere that encouraged his profound negligence of everything; and his natural listlessness would have glided from refinement to effeminacy, and from lazy grace to blase inertia.
The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the French army had roused the sleeping lion in him, and made him as fine a soldier as ever ranged under any flag.

He had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved, hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a vividness that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless, insouciant world of other days.

It developed him into a magnificent soldier--too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service he had adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever lived under any other flag than that tricolor which he followed and defended now.
The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved over the gates of Royallieu--"Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume"-- verified itself in his case.

Outlawed, beggared, robbed at a stroke of every hope and prospect--he had taken his adversity boldly by the beard, and had made himself at once a country and a kingdom among the brave, fierce, reckless, loyal hearts of the men who came from north, south, east, and west--driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate--to fill up the battalions of North Africa.
As he went now, in the warmth of the after-glow, he turned up into the Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance of a narrow, dark, tumble-down, picturesque shop, half like a stall of a Cairo bazaar; half like a Jew's den in a Florentine alley.
A cunning, wizen head peered out at him from the gloom.
"Ah, ha! Good-even, Corporal Victor!" Cecil, at the words, crossed the sill and entered.
"Have you sold any ?" he asked.

There was a slight constraint and hesitation in the words, as of one who can never fairly bend his spirit to the yoke of barter.
The little, hideous, wrinkled, dwarf-like creature, a trader in curiosities, grinned with a certain gratification in disappointing this lithe-limbed, handsome Chasseur.
"Not one.