Their
threadbare blue uniforms with the shabby red facings, even their
epaulets flung back behind their shoulders (a sign throughout the
army, even among the leaders, of a lack of overcoats),--all these
things brought the two Republican officers into strong relief against
the men who surrounded them.
"Oh, they are the Nation, and that means liberty!" thought Marie;
then, with a glance at the royalists, she added, "on the other side is
a man, a king, and privileges." She could not refrain from admiring
Merle, so thoroughly did that gay soldier respond to the ideas she had
formed of the French trooper who hums a tune when the balls are
whistling, and jests when a comrade falls. Gerard was more imposing.
Grave and self-possessed, he seemed to have one of those truly
Republican spirits which, in the days of which we write, crowded the
French armies, and gave them, by means of these noble individual
devotions, an energy which they had never before possessed. "That is
one of my men with great ideals," thought Mademoiselle de Verneuil.
"Relying on the present, which they rule, they destroy the past for
the benefit of the future."
The thought saddened her because she could not apply it to her lover;
towards whom she now turned, to discard by a different admiration,
these beliefs in the Republic she was already beginning to dislike.
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