Page:A French Volunteer of the War of Independence.djvu/257

Rh greatly to his honour. An émigré applied to him, in the name of Bouchard. "I can do nothing for Citizen Bouchard," was the reply, "but I will do all in my power for M. de Montmorenci."

Anyhow, there I was in France, and when I arrived in Paris, I was as much under the shelter of the law as any inhabitant who had never quitted the country, or meddled in political events.

That is what nearly everyone feels, and nearly everyone says,—from Tancred to Potaveri, from the Frenchman to the Hottentot;—but I said nothing of the kind.

The ruling inclination in me,—it has been a slight fault of mine ever since I was twenty years of age,—is to indulge in a private chuckle, and so I admire very little, and I rarely blame, and though I do not laugh outright, I laugh in my beard, for I have seen so much that I have learned to estimate events at their proper value, and I praise no celebrity till after he is