Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/93

1790] South-Western region and elsewhere; and has seen riot, civil battle by daylight and by torchlight, and anarchy hatefuler than death. How insubordinate Troopers, with drink in their heads, meet Captain Dampmartin and another on the ramparts, where there is no escape or side-path; and make military salute punctually, for we look calm on them; yet make it in a snappish, almost insulting manner: how one morning they 'leave all their chamois-shirts' and superfluous buffs, which they are tired of, laid in piles at the Captains' doors; whereat 'we laugh,' as the ass does eating thistles: nay how they 'knot two forage-cords together,' with universal noisy cursing, with evident intent to hang the Quartermaster:—all this the worthy Captain, looking on it through the ruddy-and-sable of fond regretful memory, has flowingly written down. Men growl in vague discontent; officers fling up their commissions and emigrate in disgust.

Or let us ask another literary Officer; not yet Captain; Sublieutenant only, in the Artillery Regiment La Fère: a young man of twenty-one; not unentitled to speak; the name of him is Napoleon Buonaparte. To such height of Sublieutenancy has he now got promoted, from Brienne School, five years ago; 'being found qualified in mathematics by La Place.' He is lying at Auxonne, in the West, in these months; not sumptuously lodged—'in the house of a Barber, to whose wife he did not pay the customary degree of respect'; or even over at the Pavilion, in a chamber with bare walls; the only furniture an indifferent 'bed without curtains, two chairs, and in the recess of a window a table covered with books and papers: his Brother Louis sleeps on a coarse mattress in an adjoining room.' However, he is doing something great: writing his first Book or Pamphlet,—eloquent vehement Letter to M. Matteo Buttafuoco, our Corsican Deputy, who is not a Patriot, but an Aristocrat unworthy of Deputyship. Joly of Dôle is Publisher. The literary Sublieutenant corrects the proofs; 'sets out on foot from