"An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle," she would say, "but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peacock." Which was the reason why she flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolence imaginable, but took the part of "Marquise," of "Bel-a-faire-peur," and of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa.

With a word here and a touch there,--tender, soft, and bright,--since, however ironic her mood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay in such sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the narrow chink of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she came most specially to visit--a bed on which was stretched the emaciated form of a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god.
The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth were tight clinched on lips white and parched; and his immense eyes, with the heavy circles round them, were fastened on vacancy with the yearning misery that gleams in the eyes of a Spanish bull when it is struck again and again by the matador, and yet cannot die.
She bent over him softly.
"Tiens, M.Leon! I have brought you some ice." His weary eyes turned on her gratefully; he sought to speak, but the effort brought the spasm on his lungs afresh; it shook him with horrible violence from head to foot, and the foam on his auburn beard was red with blood.
There was no one by to watch him; he was sure to die; a week sooner or later--what mattered it! He was useless as a soldier; good only to be thrown into a pit, with some quicklime to hasten destruction and do the work of the slower earthworms.
Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine-leaves a cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him; the delicious coolness and freshness in that parching, noontide heat stilled the convulsion; his eyes thanked her, though his lips could not; he lay panting, exhausted, but relieved; and she--thoughtfully for her--slid herself down on the floor, and began singing low and sweetly, as a fairy might sing on the raft of a water-lily leaf.

She sung quadriales, to be sure, Beranger's songs and odes of the camp; for she knew of no hymn but the "Marseillaise," and her chants were all chants like the "Laus Veneris." But the voice that gave them was pure as the voice of a thrush in the spring, and the cadence of its music was so silvery sweet that it soothed like a spell all the fever-racked brains, all the pain-tortured spirits.
"Ah, that is sweet," murmured the dying man.

"It is like the brooks--like the birds--like the winds in the leaves." He was but half conscious; but the lulling of that gliding voice brought him peace.

And Cigarette sung on, only moving to reach him some fresh touch of ice, while time traveled on, and the first afternoon shadows crept across the bare floor.