XXIX. that the clear incisive words in which he described CHAP. to me the mechanism of the "movable column," were a model of military diction; but his keen, handsome, eager features so kindled with the mere stir and pomp of war he seemed so to love the swift going and coming of his aides-de-camp, and the rolling drums, and the joyful appeal of the bugles he was so content with the gleam of his epaulettes, half-hidden and half-revealed by the graceful white cabaan so happy in the bounding pride of his Arab charger that he did not seem like a man destined to be chosen from out of all others as the instrument of a scheme requiring grave care and secrecy. Yet of secrecy he was most capable; and at that very time he had upon his mind,* and was concealing, not from me only (for that would be only natural), but from every officer and man around him, a deed of such a kind that few men perhaps have ever done the like of it in secret. the We saw that, before the December of 1851, enterprising and resolute Fleury was in Algeria, seeking out a fit African officer, who would take the post of Minister of War, with a view of joining the President in his plans for the overthrow of the Republic. Monsieur St Arnaud formerly Le Roy had not so lived as to occasion any difficulty in approaching him with dishonouring proposals; and The act here alluded to is spoken of further on. It took place about six weeks before the time when I first saw Colonel St Arnaud. XXIX. CHAP. there was ground for inferring that he might prove equal to the task which was to be set before him. The able administrator of a great district in Algeria might be competent to head a department. The commander of the "Infernal Column" was not likely to be wanting in the ruthlessness which was needed; and if his vanity made it seem doubtful whether he was a man who could keep a secret, there was a confidential paper in existence which might tend to allay the fear. St Arnaud had warmly approved the destruction of life which had been effected in 1844 by filling with smoke the crowded caves of the Dahra; but he had sagaciously observed that the popularity of the measure in Europe was not co-extensive with the approbation which seems to have been bestowed upon its author by the military authorities. These counterviews guided M. St Arnaud. In the summer of 1845 he received private information that a body of Arabs had taken refuge in the cave of Shelas. Thither he marched a body of troops. Eleven of the fugitives came out and surrendered; but it was known to St Arnaud, though not to any other Frenchman, that five hundred men remained in the cave. All these people Colonel St Arnaud determined to kill, and so far he perhaps felt that he was only an imitator of Pelissier;* but the resolve which ac * It is believed, however, that Pelissier left open some of the entrances to the cave, and that he only resorted to the smoke as a means of compelling the fugitives to come out and surrender. XXIX. companied the formation of this scheme was original. CHAP. He determined to keep the deed secret even from the troops engaged in the operation. Except his brother, and Marshal Bugeaud, whose approval was the prize he sought for, no one was to know what he did. He contrived to execute both his purposes. "Then," he writes to his brother, "I had all the "apertures hermetically stopped up. I made one "vast sepulchre. No one went into the caverns; no "one but myself knew that under there, there are five "hundred brigands who will never again slaughter "Frenchmen. A confidential report has told all to "the Marshal, without terrible poetry or imagery. "Brother, no one is so good as I am by taste and "by nature. From the 8th to the 12th I have been "ill, but my conscience does not reproach me. I have "done my duty as a commander, and to-morrow I "would do the same over again; but I have taken a 'disgust to Africa."* The officer who could cause French soldiery to be the unconscious instruments for putting to death five hundred fugitive men, and who could afterwards keep concealed from the whole force all knowledge of what it had done, was likely to be the very person for whom Fleury was seeking. He was brought back to Paris, and made Minister of War, with a view to the great plot of the 2d of December. France knows how well, sooner or later, he answered to Fleury's * St Arnaud's letters, published by his relatives after his death. XXIX. CHAP. best hopes. He kept his counsel close until the appointed night, and then (whatever faltering there may have been between midnight and three in the morning) he was out in time for the deed; and before the daylight came he had stabbed France through in her sleep. Amongst men who make a great capture, there will often spring up questions concerning the division of the spoil. When he helped to make prize of France, St Arnaud of course got much; but his wants were vast, and he had earned a clear right to extort from his chief accomplice, and to go back again, and again, and yet again, with the terrible demand for "more!" He was in such a condition of health as to be unfit to command an army in the field; for although, during intervals, he was free from pain and glowing with energy, he was from time to time utterly cast down by his recurring malady. It is possible that notwithstanding his bodily state, he may have sincerely longed to have the command of an army in a European campaign; but whether he thus longed or not, he unquestionably said that he did; and the French Emperor took him at his word, consenting, as was very natural, that his dangerous, insatiate friend should have a command which would take him into the country of the Lower Danube. Apparently it was not believed that, in point of warlike skill, M. St Arnaud was well fitted to the command; for the French Emperor, as will be seen, resorted to the plan of surrounding him with men XXIX. who were virtually empowered to guide him with CHAP. their overruling counsels. To try to understand the relations between the allied Generals of France and England, without knowing something of the repute in which Marshal St Arnaud was held by his fellow-countrymen, would be to go blindfold; and a narrator keeping silence on this subject would be hiding a fact which belongs to history, and a fact, too, which is one of deep moment, and fruitful of lessons. Paris stripped of the weapons which kill the body, and robbed of her appeal to honest print, was more than ever pitiless with the tongue; and M. St Arnaud being laid open by the tenor of the life that he had led, his reputation fell a prey to cruel speech. The people of the capital knew of no crime too vile to be imputed to the new Marshal of France now intrusted with the command of her army in the field. Yet, so far as I know, they failed to make out that he had ever been convicted, or even arrested, on a criminal charge; and when I look at the affectionate correspondence which almost through his life M. St Arnaud seems to have maintained with his near relatives, I am led to imagine that they at least and they would have been likely to know something of the truth-could have hardly believed his worst errors to be errors of the more dishonouring sort. Therefore there is ground for surmising that the Marshal was a man slandered. But in these times the chief defence against slanders upon public men is to be found in the award that |