The dragoon flushed. He looked at the lieutenant, who looked him squarely in the eye, calmly and coolly. Self-esteem aiding, this hint was efficacious with the rebel. He remounted and the session ended without further incident. The conquered beast behaved as well with her new rider as with the other. "Now," said Landri to the quartermaster, "bring in the others." "You were in luck," said the quartermaster to Baudoin a few moments later. "With another man, you'd have had a curry-combing, and a good one." "And the other man, too, perhaps," retorted Baudoin with a leer. "But this one didn't put a gag in my mouth, that's true enough." "I have not wasted my morning," Landri reflected, as he left the riding-school. Awaiting the hour for the foot-drill, he entered the small room used by the officers as a library and gathering-place. It was very simply furnished, with a divan, a few easy-chairs, and a large table, all covered with coarse blue stuff with a red border. On two sides were book-shelves. On the other walls were engravings, some of which represented the early days of the 32nd Dragoons. First, there was a Cavalier de Lévis, with the date 1703, in three-cornered hat and white tunic, with red lapels and trimmings. Another Cavalier de Lévis, in a very similar uniform, bore this inscription: 1724. Then came two troopers of the Royal-Normandie, dated 1768 and 1784. They wore blue tunics with amaranth-colored lapels, and white cockades in their hats. A trooper of the 19th Cavalry, in a blue coat _à la française_, with a tri-colored plume in his shako, marked the beginning of modern times. It needed no more than a glance at those engravings for Landri's comparative tranquillity of the last hour to come to an abrupt end. The sight of those uniforms of the old régime recalled the scene of two days before, M. de Claviers pointing to the portrait of the lieutenant-general, and his exclamation about the uniforms and the dandyfied heroism of bygone days. The thought of the marquis recalled the old gentleman's other outbreak, only the night before, concerning the inventories, just as the memory of the Parrocel portrait revived the sensations born of the hideous falsehood of his birth. The associations of these various ideas resulted in a new idea which, when it had once entered his mind, could no more be expelled from it than could the hateful fact with which it was connected. It was only the continuation, the smoothing-off as it were in the lucid portions of the love-child's consciousness, of a course of reasoning that he had been working out, unknowingly, for twelve hours past. "But have I the right, from this time on, bearing a name that is not my own, and knowing it, to act with that name as if it were my own?"