A few hours amid the dust; the sweltering heat; the yellings of the excited populace; the roaring of cannon and the pattering of musketry; saw the troop in which he served, broken and scattered, and Panpan himself rolling in the dust, with a thousand lights flashing in his eyes, and a brass button lodged in his side!
“Those villains of Parisians!” he exclaimed, “not content with showering their whole garde meuble upon our heads, fired upon us a diabolical collection of missiles, such as no mortal ever thought of before:—bits of broken brass; little plates of tin and iron rolled into sugar-loaves; crushed brace-buckles; crooked nails and wads of metal wire;—anything, indeed, that in their extremity they could lay their hands on, and ram into the muzzle of a gun! These things inflicted fearful gashes, and, in many cases, a mere flesh-wound turned out a death-stroke. Few that got hurt in our own troop lived to tell the tale.”
A few more days and the whole royal cavalcade was scattered like chaff before the wind, and Charles the Tenth a fugitive on his way to England; a few more days and the wily Louis Philippe was taking the oath to a new constitution, and our friend, Panpan, lay carefully packed, brass button and all, in the Hôtel-Dieu. The brass button was difficult to find, and when found the ugly fissure it had made grew gangrened, and would not heal; and thus it happened that many a bed became vacant, and got filled, and was vacant again, as their occupants either walked out, or were borne out, of the hospital gates, before Panpan was declared convalescent, and finally dismissed from the Hôtel-Dieu as “cured.”
The proud trooper was, however, an altered man; his health and spirits were gone; the whole corps of which he had so often boasted was broken up and dispersed; his means of livelihood were at an end, and, what was worse, he knew of no other in the exercise of which he could gain his daily bread. There were very many such helpless, tradeless men pacing the streets of Paris, when the fever of the revolution was cooled down, and ordinary business ways began to take their course. Nor was it those alone who were uninstructed in any useful occupation, but there were also the turbulent, dissatisfied spirits; builders of barricades, and leaders of club-sections, whom the late excitement, and their temporary elevation above their fellow workmen, had left restless and ambitious, and whose awakened energies, if not directed to some useful and congenial employment, would infallibly lead to mischief.