Clementine sent him no answer, but, just as he was getting on the train, he was accosted by a messenger, who handed him a pretty red leather pocket-book, and ran away with all his might. The pocket-book was entirely new, solid, and carefully fastened. It contained twelve hundred francs in bank notes--all the young girl's savings. Fougas had no time to deliberate on this delicate circumstance. He was pushed into a car, the locomotive puffed, and the train started. The Colonel began to review in his memory the various events which had succeeded each other in his life during less than a week. His arrest among the frosts of the Vistula, his sentence to death, his imprisonment in the fortress of Liebenfeld, his reawakening at Fontainebleau, the invasion of 1814, the return from the island of Elba, the hundred days, the death of the emperor and the king of Rome, the restoration of the Bonapartes in 1852, his meeting with a young girl who was the counterpart of Clementine Pichon in all respects, the flag of the 23d, the duel with the colonel of cuirassiers--all this, for Fougas, had not taken up more than four days. The night reaching from the 11th of November, 1813, to the 17th of August, 1859, seemed to him even a little shorter than any of the others; for it was the only time that he had had a full sleep, without any dreaming. A less active spirit, and a heart less warm, would, perhaps, have lapsed into a sort of melancholy. For, in fact, one who has been asleep for forty-six years would naturally become somewhat alien to mankind in general, even in his own country. Not a relation, not a friend, not a familiar face, on the whole face of the earth! Add to this a multitude of new words, ideas, customs, and inventions, which make him feel the need of a cicerone, and prove to him that he is a stranger. But Fougas, on reopening his eyes, following the precept of Horace, was thrown into the very midst of action. He had improvised for him friends, enemies, a sweetheart, and a rival. Fontainebleau, his second native place, was, provisionally, the central point of his existence. There he felt himself loved, hated, feared, admired--in a word, well known. He knew that in that sub-prefecture his name could not be spoken without awakening an echo. But what attached him more than all to modern times, was his well-established relationship with the great family of the army. Wherever a French flag floats, the soldier, young or old, is at home. Around that church-spire of the fatherland, though dear and sacred in a way different from the village spire, language, ideas, and institutions change but little. The death of individuals has little effect; they are replaced by others who look like them, and think, talk, and act in the same way; who do not stop on assuming the uniform of their predecessors, but inherit their souvenirs also--the glory they have acquired, their traditions, their jests, and even certain intonations of their voices.