This carnage was succeeded by a kind of stupor. The next instant the colonel, with his hat on his sword’s point, had scaled the parapet with a cry of “Vive l’Empereur.” The survivors followed him. All that succeeded is to me a kind of dream. We rushed into the redoubt, I know not how, we fought hand to hand in the midst of smoke so thick that no man could perceive his enemy. I found my sabre dripping blood; I heard a shout of “Victory”; and, in the clearing smoke, I saw the earthworks piled with dead and dying. The cannons were covered with a heap of corpses. About two hundred men in the French uniform were standing, without order, loading their muskets or wiping their bayonets. Eleven Russian prisoners were with them. The colonel was lying, bathed in blood, upon a broken cannon. A group of soldiers crowded round him. I approached them. “Who is the oldest captain?” he was asking of a sergeant. The sergeant shrugged his shoulders most expressively. “Who is the oldest lieutenant?” “This gentleman, who came last night,” replied the sergeant calmly. The colonel smiled bitterly. “Come, sir,” he said to me, “you are now in chief command. Fortify the gorge of the redoubt at once with wagons, for the enemy is out in force. But General C---- is coming to support you.” “Colonel,” I asked him, “are you badly wounded?” “Pish, my dear fellow. The redoubt is taken.” THE VENDEAN MARRIAGE BY JULES GABRIEL JANIN [Illustration] _Thackeray, writing from Paris to Mrs. Brookfield in 1849, says of Jules Janin: “He has made his weekly feuilleton (the Journal des Débats), famous throughout Europe--he does not know a word of English, but he translated Sterne and I think ‘Clarissa Harlowe.’ He has the most wonderful verve, humor, oddity, honesty, bonhomie ... bounced about the room, gesticulating, joking, gasconading, quoting Latin....” We know that Janin was more concerned in amusing his readers and himself than imparting instruction--though he did both._ _Jules Janin was born at Saint-Étienne in 1804, and died in Paris in 1874. In 1836 he entered on that famous career of forty years as dramatic critic of the “Journal des Débats.” These contributions were afterward collected under the title “History of Dramatic Literature.”_ [Illustration] THE VENDEAN MARRIAGE BY JULES JANIN Translated by Jane G. Cooke. Copyright, 1899, by The Current Literature Publishing Company. So you have never heard the circumstances of Monsieur Baudelot de Dairval’s marriage, the man who died four years ago, and was so mourned by his wife that she died a week later herself, good lady? Yet it is a story worth telling.