We had been travelling since morning, three of us--my father, General Count Mahon, myself, and Joubert--to say nothing of Marengo the boarhound which followed our carriage. The great old family travelling-carriage, packed with luggage, wine, and cigars, and drawn by two stout horses, had been making the dust of Germany fly over the hedgeless German fields since dawn. It was noon now, and hot. I remember still the exact feel and smell of the blazing blue cushions as I pressed my childish cheek against them and felt how hot they were, and the unfailing pleasure and wonder with which the apple and plum trees bordering the road filled my soul. Apple trees and plum trees bordering the road, laden with fruit and unprotected, the snub-nosed German children we passed on the wayside, seemed to my mind happier than the inhabitants of Golconda, living in a country like that. It was the first of September, 1860. I was only nine then, but I did not complain of the heat or the dust, or the cramp that inhabited, like a crab, the old-time travelling-carriage, seizing you now in the back, now in the leg, now in the spirit. For one thing, I was to be a soldier, like my father, and wear white moustaches and smoke cigars, and carry a sword; for another thing, we had been travelling a month, and I was inured to the business, and, for another thing, I was a Mahon. The man beside me, buttoned in a blue frock-coat, adorned with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, stout, rubicund of face, opulent, and magnificent-looking, was, with the exception of my small self, the last representative of the Mahons of Tullaghmore. Napoleon had drawn the Mahons from Ireland to France just as a magnet attracts steel-filings. My grandfather had seen the burning of Moscow, and had ridden in the charge of Millhaud's cuirassiers on that fatal Sunday men call Waterloo Day; and my father, the man beside me in the blue frock-coat, had adorned the French army with the help of his splendid personality, his sword, and a few francs a day, till his marriage with Marie Marquise de Saluce, a woman of marvellous beauty, great wealth, and the inheritor of the Château de Saluce, which is near Etiolles, but a few miles from Paris. It was a love-match pure and simple--one of those fairyland marriages arranged by love--and she died when I was born. My father would have shot himself only for Joubert--Joubert, corporal in the 121st of the Line, a personage with an angry, withered, sunburnt face, eyes and moustache like the eyes and moustache of a wrathful cat, the heart of a child, and the figure and perfume of a ramrod. The sense of smell plays a large part in the lives of children, and conjures up visions with a tremendous potency, lost as the child deteriorates into a man. Joubert smelt of gunpowder. Probably it was only the Caporal which he smoked, but to my mind it was the true smell of the Grand Army.