The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal Page B

truth if it offends their vanity. But I don’t give a damn about their dirty looks, and I’d better let them know it.” They kept on their way, five hundred yards from that river of fugitives on the high road. About a league farther, the corporal and his troop crossed a road that ran toward the high road, where a lot of soldiers were lying on the ground. Fabrizio bought a pretty good horse for forty francs, and among all the sabers lying about he carefully selected a huge straight one. “Since they say you have to stab with it,” he decided, “this one’s best.” Thus armed, he galloped on and soon rejoined the corporal, who had marched ahead. He stood up in his stirrups, grasped the scabbard of his straight saber in his left hand, and cried to the four Frenchmen: “Those men running down the road look like a flock of sheep.… They’re running like scared sheep …!”
    Though Fabrizio emphasized the word
sheep
, his comrades no longer remembered having been offended by this word an hour before. Here appeared one of the contrasts between the Italian and French characters; the Frenchman is no doubt the better off of the two: he slides over the surface of events and bears no grudges.
    We shall not conceal the fact that Fabrizio was quite pleased with himself after repeating the word
sheep
. The men marched on, talking of one thing and another. Two leagues farther, the corporal, still amazed at not seeing any sign of enemy cavalry, said to Fabrizio, “You be our cavalry: ride over to the farm up that little hill, ask the farmer if he’ll
sell
us something to eat—explain that there are only five of us. If he hesitates, give him five francs of your own money in advance, but rest easy, we’ll get it all back after we eat.”
    Fabrizio stared at the corporal, seeing an imperturbable gravity in his face, indeed an expression of moral superiority; he obeyed. Everything happened as his commander had foreseen, except that Fabrizio insisted that the five francs he had given the farmer not be recovered by force.
    “It’s my money,” he told his comrades, “and I’m not paying for you, I’m paying for the oats he’s given my horse.”
    Fabrizio pronounced French so poorly that his comrades imagined they detected a tone of superiority in his words; they were deeply offended, and from that moment a duel began to take shape in their minds for the end of the day. They considered him quite different from themselves, which distressed them all; Fabrizio, on the contrary, was beginning to feel warm friendship toward every man among them.
    They had marched without speaking for two hours when the corporal, peering over at the high road, exclaimed in a transport of joy, “There’s the regiment!”
    They soon reached the road, but alas! there were less than two hundred men mustered under the eagle. Fabrizio immediately caught sight of the canteen-woman, on foot now, red-eyed and occasionally sobbing. He saw no sign of Cocotte or the little cart.
    “Looted! Robbed! Ruined!” the canteen-woman cried, responding to our hero’s anxious glance. Without a word, Fabrizio dismounted, took his horse by the bridle, and told the canteen-woman to mount. She did not wait for a second invitation. “Shorten the stirrups for me, my boy.” Once in the saddle, she began telling Fabrizio all the night’s disasters. After an endless narrative eagerly attended by our hero, who, to tell the truth, didn’t understand a word but felt a tender comradeship for the canteen-woman, she ended her story with these words: “And just think, it was the French who beat me and robbed me and ruined me …!”
    “You mean it wasn’t the enemy?” Fabrizio asked with the naïve expression that made his pale, serious, handsome face so charming.
    “You really are stupid, my poor boy!” The canteen-woman smiled through her tears. “But you’re a sweet lad, all the same.”
    “And this same lad took care of his Prussian very nicely,” said Corporal