"The peace of 1815 is no peace; it is a halt in the mud!" General Exelmans, the other old war comrade who was to survive him by twenty years to die from a fall off his horse, came also to see him, and to try to restore hope, which, as we have said, had long before died in the heart of the invalid. "What matter," he exclaimed, in a kind of impatience, "what matter that I die, provided my country lives?" In a moment of discouragement, when he saw open before him the grave, which had swallowed up much patriotism, he had the sword of honour brought to him which had been given him by the officers of the Hundred Days, whose cause he had pleaded with much fervour and great success; then, sitting up in bed, he drew the sword from its scabbard, looked at it a long time, laid it across his knees, and finally carried it to his lips, saying-- "My dear officers of the Hundred Days! They gave it me to be used, and I have not used it!" Once, overcome by grief, in the presence of Dr. Lisfranc, he made an onslaught against the impotent art which we call medicine. Suddenly, perceiving before whom he was speaking, he said-- "I curse medicine, but I bless doctors, who do a lot with the small amount of knowledge which science places in their hands. Embrace me, Lisfranc, and do not forget that I loved you very much!" His last moments were, as we see, worthy of a soldier; he had struggled against death as Leonidas against Xerxes; his bed had been the battlefield. An hour before he died, in the agony which his sufferings betrayed by his starts and shudderings, he opened his eyes, which had been closed for thirty-six hours, and three times he uttered the two words: "Honour! Country!"--the two words engraved on the Cross of the Legion of Honour. He breathed his last an hour after he had uttered the cry which had been that of his whole lifetime. It is said that a dying man achieves greatness; it is true, both morally as well as physically. General Lamarque increased enormously in greatness in everybody's eyes. They remembered the boy volunteer of nineteen, the young captain of the famous infernal column, bringing to the Convention a strip of flag taken from the enemy, and winning from that great and terrible Assembly a vote pronouncing Captain Lamarque to have deserved well from his country. How splendid his military life had been through the thirty years that had passed since then!