"Where could it have come from, Monsieur?" she haughtily replied; "it is the portrait of my grandfather." "Aha!" we exclaimed, all four of us, turning ourselves round with surprise. With one hand our hostess stirred the fire, with an indifference evidently affected, while with the other she rocked the little box in which her infant was asleep. "Might I presume to inquire the name of Monsieur your grandfather?" said I, drawing near to her. "He was the Count of Anteroches," was her reply. "What, the Count of Anteroches, who commanded the French guards at the battle of Fontenoy?"[5] "You have heard him spoken of, then?" resumed the peasant girl, with a smile. My friend the Broker stood as if stupefied before the picture. All of a sudden he wheeled round, and, gravely removing his cap, repeated with a theatrical air the celebrated saying of M. d'Anteroches,--"Fire first, _Messieurs les Anglais_; we are Frenchmen, and must do you the honors!" This anecdote is, to my thinking, the most charming and most thoroughly stamped with the image of the age of any recorded in history. With regard to these celebrated sayings uttered in battles, I must indeed confess that I am very skeptical. Little as I may be of a soldier, I have a notion that it is not in an engagement as at the Olympic Circus, and that in the midst of fire, smoke, and musketry, generals must have other work on their hands than to utter these pretty epigrams, which there is moreover no shorthand writer at hand to take down. I know that Cambronne was annoyed when they recalled to him his splendid exclamation at Waterloo, "_La garde meurt et ne se rend pas!_" (The guard dies, and does not surrender!) "an invention the more clumsy," said he, "that I am not yet dead, and that I really did surrender." I have even discovered that this saying was invented by a member of the Institute, for the greater satisfaction of the readers of the "Yellow Dwarf," in which he wrote, in 1815, together with Benjamin Constant and many other celebrated malcontents.[6] The speeches of Leonidas find me equally incredulous. But, wheresoever they may come from, I delight in these anecdotes, which personify an entire epoch, and engrave it upon the memory with a single stroke. We may defy the historian who seeks to characterize the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, to find two epigrams more striking than the words attributed to Anteroches and Cambronne--to two French officers--one commanding the French guards, the other the old guard; both fighting for their country, at an interval of seventy years, with the same enemy, and on the same ground: for it is a singular coincidence that Fontenoy and Waterloo are but little distant from each other, and Heaven saw fit to ordain that the game of success and reverse should be played out almost upon the same fields. "Fire first, _Messieurs les Anglais_!" Is it not the type of that easy and