“Absinthe,” muttered another. “A comedy that was hissed.” “The spleen.” “The dice.” “The roulette.” “The natural desire of humanity to kill or to get killed!” “Morbleu!” cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, “all those mischiefs beat the drum, and send volunteers to the ranks, sure enough; but the General named the worst. Look at that little Cora; the Minister of War should give her the Cross. She sends us ten times more fire-eaters than the Conscription does. Five fine fellows--of the vieille roche too--joined to-day, because she has stripped them of everything, and they have nothing for it but the service. She is invaluable, Cora.” “And there is not much to look at in her either,” objected a captain, who commanded Turcos. “I saw her when our detachment went to show in Paris. A baby face, innocent as a cherub--a soft voice--a shape that looks as slight and as breakable as the stem of my glass--there is the end!” The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully, but gently; he had been a great lion of the fashionable world before he came out to his Indigenes. “The end of Cora! The end of her is--My good Alcide--that 'baby face' has ruined more of us than would make up a battalion. She is so quiet, so tender; smiles like an angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sad too, the innocent dove; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and paf! before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands, and you wake one fine morning bankrupt!” “Why do you let her do it?” growled the vieille moustache, who had served under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant knowledge of the ways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue Breda. “Ah, bah!” said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders; “it is the thing to be ruined by Cora.” Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with the sigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it. “It was Coeur d'Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up--that woman--in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she stripped me as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was uncut emeralds just then. Well uncut emeralds made an end of me, and sent me out here. Coeur d'Acier was a wonderful woman!--and the chief wonder of her was, that she was as ugly as sin.” “Ugly!” “Ugly as sin! But she had the knack of making herself more charming than Venus. How she did it nobody knew; but men left the prettiest creatures for her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of a score a month.” “Like Loto,” chimed in the Tirailleur. “Loto has not a shred of beauty. She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, with a rough voice and a villainous patois; but to be well with Loto is to have achieved distinction at once. She will have nothing under the third order of nobility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day. She is a great creature, Loto; nobody knows her secret.”