almost unbounded. He had a habit of gargling his r ’s. His voice, easily as mighty as that of Charles Nodier’s Oudet, gave a powerful resonance to the syllable or consonant on which that gargle landed. If at times this mispronunciation was a most elegant thing, it was quite different when he was commanding maneuvers or in the grip of emotion: Never can you imagine the potency expressed by that intonation, however vulgar it may be considered in Paris. You would have had to hear him. When the colonel felt at peace, his blue eyes painted a portrait of angelic mildness, and his noble brow bore an expression full of charm. At a review, no man in all the Italian army could rival him. D’Orsay himself, the magnificent d’Orsay, was bested by our colonel during Napoleon’s final review of the troops before entering Russia. All was opposition in this extraordinary man. Now, contrast is the lifeblood of passion; no need to ask, then, if he exerted on women that irresistible influence to which your nature”—the general was looking at the Princess de Cadignan—“bends like molten glass beneath the glassblower’s pipe. But by a curious caprice of fate, as any observer could see for himself, the colonel had very little luck with the ladies, or perhaps he neglected to try. To give you an idea of his tempers, let me recount in two words what I once saw him do in a fit of rage. We were climbing a very narrow path with our cannon, a rather high embankment on one side of the road and woods on the other. Halfway up, we met with another artillery regiment, headed by a colonel, coming the other way. This colonel ordered our regiment’s captain, who was leading the first battery, to reverse course. Naturally our captain refuses, but the colonel waves his first battery forward, and despite the quick-thinking driver’s attempt to steer into the woods, the wheel of the first cannon caught our captain’s right leg and broke it at one go, tossing him over his horse. All this in the blink of an eye. From some distance away, our colonel spies the quarrel in progress and comes galloping forward, weaving his way between cannon and trees, at the risk of finding himself knocked flat on his back at any moment. He reaches the other colonel just as our captain is falling from his horse and crying for help. No, our Italian colonel was no longer a man! . . . A foam like frothing champagne bubbled from his lips, and he growled like a lion. Unable to speak a word, unable even to shout, he made his fearsome meaning clear to his antagonist simply by drawing his saber and pointing toward the woods. The two colonels strode off into the trees. Two seconds later we saw our colonel’s adversary sprawled on the ground, his head split in two. The other soldiers backed away, oh by God they did, and double-quick! Now, this captain who’d nearly been killed, still howling in the mud puddle where the cannon had deposited him, was married to a stunning Italian woman from Messina, who was not indifferent to our colonel’s charms. This had only heightened his fury. The husband had been placed in his charge; he had to defend him, just as he would the woman herself. As it happens, in that hospitable hut just past Zembin, this same captain sat facing me at the table, and his wife at the other end, across from the colonel. She was a small woman by the name of Rosina, very dark, but all the heat of the Sicilian sun could be seen in her almond-shaped black eyes. She had grown frightfully thin; her cheeks were speckled with dirt, like a piece of fruit on a tree by a well-traveled road. Clad—and just barely!—in rags, weary from too much walking, her hair matted and uncombed beneath a torn marmot-fur shawl, she had nevertheless retained a certain womanliness: Her gestures were pretty to see, her mouth pink and puckered; her white teeth, the contours of her face and her bust—charms that privation, cold, and neglect had not entirely blighted—still spoke of love to
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