"Yes, I make the dolls' houses and carve the furniture--great work, that, for a man, sir? I used to be a cabinet-maker at Annapolis--before my leg got so bad. No, sir, I did not learn my trade there. I was apprenticed to Cadieux, who was cabinet-maker to Napoleon. Yes, the Emperor. Who else could it have been? But that was after those pigs of Russians shot me in the leg. It was their ball that brought me here," with a contemptuous glance at his bandaged leg. "I was color-bearer--you see, I was too young to go in any other way. I was sixteen when I was wounded."
"Why, no, sir, it isn't much of a story. It is only that I could never stay still. I don't believe men were ever meant to. That's why it's--" He checked himself with a glance at his wife. "I was born in the Tyrol, but the name of Buonaparte pulled me to France. Why, sir, I don't know what it was, but he is the only great man I have ever known. He made you drop everything and go with him, that is all. We never stopped to ask what it was, but--he knew his soldiers, he didn't know what it was to be afraid--and where he wanted to go he went."
The Man, who had been listening thus far with sympathy, started--at these last words--into tenseness.
"Did your Napoleon never--doubt?" he asked, with rather a breathless voice.
"If he did, no one ever saw him," chuckled the cabinet-maker, indulgently. "That was why we followed him. It sounds like very little, but--if he could call me to-day, I'd jump up and hop on one leg after him."
Had Joseph Schotz not been lost in the one story that never failed to thrill him--of his shattered dreams and his hero--he would have noticed that the face of the tall man who sat before him had lapsed into hopelessness. This time there was even something desperate in the eyes. But Napoleon's color-bearer went on:
"But you see--instead of that I'm here." He glanced at his leg again with a repressed passion of bitterness, which made him in some dark way kin to the man who listened. "It was when I couldn't fight for him that I learned to carve the wreaths on the chairs at the Tuileries--after all, that was near the end.... It is never as the Emperor on his throne that I think of him--I have seen him so--or as the general on horseback; but as the soldier in his gray overcoat going about among us. He had a way of standing, sir, as if you couldn't dislodge him--that was Buonaparte."