His heart is broken. Behold how he loved the emperor!"
The other living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest to be found in that
quiet nook of France clustered round him infinitely respectful of
that sorrow. He himself imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He
experienced quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his
fists till blood came, to lie for days on his bed with his head thrust
under the pillow; but they arose from sheer _ennui_, from the anguish
of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. Only his mental
inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him
from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing;
but his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty of expressing the
overwhelming horror of his feelings (the most furious swearing could do
no justice to it) induced gradually a habit of silence:--a sort of death
to a Southern temperament.
Great therefore was the emotion amongst the _anciens militaires_
frequenting a certain little cafe full of flies when one stuffy
afternoon "that poor General Feraud" let out suddenly a volley of
formidable curses.
He had been sitting quietly in his own privileged corner looking through
the Paris gazettes with about as much interest as a condemned man on
the eve of execution could be expected to show in the news of the day.
A cluster of martial, bronzed faces, including one lacking an eye and
another lacking the tip of a nose frost-bitten in Russia, surrounded him
anxiously.
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