Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 2.djvu/78

 daring and good man, sensible though brutal; no one ever possessed more frankness and loyalty.

Paulet's lieutenant was one of the most singular beings I ever met with: endowed with a most robust constitution, although yet very young, he had tried it with every sort of excess; he was one of those libertines who by dint of anticipating the pleasures of life's stores, spends his revenue before he gets it, eats his calf in the cow's belly. Headstrong, with vivid passions, and a heated imagination, he had early abandoned himself to premature excesses. He had not reached his twentieth year, when the decay of his lungs, together with an universal sinking of his whole frame, had compelled him to quit the artillery, into which he had entered at eighteen years of age; and now this poor fellow had scarcely a breath of life in him; he was frightfully thin; two large eyes, whose blackness made more apparent the melancholy paleness of his complexion, were apparently all that remained of this carcase, in which, however, was a soul of fire. Fleuriot was not ignorant that his days were numbered. The most able physicians had pronounced his sentence of death, and the certainty of his approaching dissolution had suggested to him a strange resolution. This is what he told me upon the subject: "I served," said he, "in the fifth regiment of light artillery, where I was entered as a volunteer. The regiment was quartered at Metz. A gay life and hard work had exhausted me, and I was as dry as parchment. One morning the turn-out was sounded, and we set off. I fell sick by the way, and received an hospital order; and a few days afterwards, the doctors, seeing that I spit blood abundantly, declared that my lungs were not m a state to be subjected to the exercise of a horse, and consequently I was advised to enter the foot artillery; and scarcely was I well, when I did so. I left one berth for another, the small for the large, the six for twelve, the spur for the spatterdash. I had no longer to gallop hard, but I had to turn my body about on the platform; to jump up and down like a goat, to roll