This time the old general turned from it. The single leaf of the door was now open about three feet and there stood beside it an old man, not at all at attention but just standing there. He was hardly larger than a child, not stooped or humped, and shrunken was not the word either. He was condensed, intact and unshriv-elled, the long ellipsoid of his life almost home again now, where rosy and blemishless, without memory or grieving flesh, mewling bald and toothless, he would once more possess but three things and would want no more: a stomach, a few surface nerves to seek warmth, a few cells capable of sleep. He was not a soldier. The very fact that he wore not only a heavy regulation infantryman's buttoned-back greatcoat but a steel helmet and a rifle slung across his back merely made him look less like one. He stood there in spectacles, in the faded coat which had been removed perhaps from its first (or last) owner's corpse-it still bore the darker va-cancies where an N. C. O.'s chevrons and a regimental number had been removed, and neatly stitched together on the front of it, just above where the skirts folded back, was the suture where something (a bayonet obviously) had entered it, and within the last twenty-four hours it had been brushed carefully and ironed by hand by someone who could not see very well-and processed through a cleansing and delousing plant and then issued to him from a quartermaster's salvage depot, and the polished steel hel-met and the clean polished rifle which looked as lovingly-tended and unused as a twelfth-century pike from a private museum, which he had never fired and did not know how to fire and would not have fired nor accepted a live cartridge for even if there was a single man in all the French armies who would have given him one. He had been the old general's ba'I'man for more than fifty years (except for the thirteen years beginning on the day more than forty years ago now when the old general, a captain with a brilliant and almost incredible future, had vanished not only from the army lists but from the ken of all the people who up to that time had thought they knew him also, to reappear thirteen years later in the army lists and the world too with the rank of brigadier and none to know whence nor why either although as regards the Wednesday Night rank they did know how; his first official act had been to find his old ba'I'man, then a clerk in a commissary's office in Saigon, and have him assigned back to his old position and rating); he stood there healthily pink as an infant, ageless and serene in his aura of indomitable fidelity, invincibly hardheaded, incorrigibly opinionated and convinced, undeflectable in advice suggestion and comment and indomitably contemptuous of war and all its rami-fications, constant durable faithful and insubordinate and almost invisible within the clutter and jumble of his martial parody so that he resembled an aged servant of some ancient ducal house dressed in ceremonial regalia for the annual commemoration of some old old event, some ancient defeat or glory of the House so long before his time that he had long ago forgotten the meaning and significance if he ever knew it, while the old general crossed the room and went back around the table and sat down again. Then the old ba'I'man turned and went back through the door and re-appeared immediately with a tray bearing a single plain soup bowl such as might have come from an N. C. O,'s mess or perhaps from that of troops themselves, and a small stone jug and the heel of a loaf and a battered pewter spoon and an immaculate folded damask napkin, and set the tray on the table before the old mar-shal and, the beautifully polished rifle gleaming and glinting as he bent and recovered and stood back, watched, fond and domi-neering and implacable, every move as the old marshal took up the bread and began to crumble it into the bowl.
When he entered St. Cyr at seventeen, except for that fragment of his splendid fate which even here he could not escape, he seemed to have brought nothing of the glittering outside world he had left behind him but a locket-a small object of chased worn gold, obviously valuable or anyway venerable, resembling a hunting-case watch and obviously capable of containing two por-traits; only capable of containing such since none of his classmates ever saw it open and in fact they only learned he possessed it through the circumstance that one or two of them happened to see it on a chain about his neck like a crucifix in the barracks bathroom one day. And even that scant knowledge was quickly adumbrated by the significance of that destiny which even these gates were incapable of severing him from-that of being not only the nephew of a Cabinet Minister, but the godson of the board chairman of that gigantic international federation producing mu-nitions which, with a few alterations in the lettering stamped into the head of each cartridge- and shell-case, fitted almost every mili-tary rifle and pistol and light field-piece in all the Western Hem-isphere and half the Eastern too. Yet despite this, because of his secluded and guarded childhood, until he entered the Academy the world outside the Faubourg St. Germain had scarcely ever seen him, and the world which began at the Paris banlieu had never even heard of him except as a male Christian name. He was an orphan, an only child, the last male of his line, who had grown from infancy in the sombre insulate house of his mother's eldest sister in the rue Vaugirard---wife of a Cabinet Minister who was himself a nobody but a man of ruthless and boundless ambition, who had needed only opportunity and got it through his wife's money and connections, and-they were childless-had legally adopted her family by hyphenating its name onto his own, the child growing to the threshold of manhood not only his uncle's heir and heir to the power and wealth of his bachelor godfather, the Comitt?de Ferrovie chairman who had been his father's closest friend, but before any save his aunt's Faubourg St. Germain salons and their servants and his tutors could connect his face with his splendid background and his fabulous future.
So when he entered the Academy, none of the classmates with whom he was to spend the next four years (and probably the staff and the professors too) had ever seen him before. And he had been there probably twenty-four hours before any of them except one even connected his face with his great name. This one was not a youth too but instead already a man, twenty-two years old, who had entered the Academy two days before and was to stand Number Two to the other's One on the day of graduation, who on that first afternoon began to believe, and for the next fifteen Wednesday Night years would continue, that he had seen at once in that seventeen-year-old face the promise of a destiny which would be the restored (this was, two years after the capitulation and formal occu-pation of Paris) glory and destiny of France too. As for the rest of them, their first reaction was that of the world outside: surprise and amazement and for the moment downright unbelief, that he, this youth, was here at all. It was not because of his appearance of fragility and indurability; they simply read the face also into that fragility and indurability which, during that first instant when he seemed to be not entering the gates but rather framed immo-bilely by them, had fixed him as absolutely and irrevocably dis-crepant to that stone-bastioned iron maw of war's apprenticeship as a figure out of a stained-glass cathedral window set by incom-prehensible chance into the breached wall of a fort. It was because, to them, his was the golden destiny of an hereditary crown prince of paradise. To them, he was not even a golden youth: he was the golden youth; to them inside the Academy and to all that world stretching from the Paris banlieu to the outermost rim where the word Paris faded, he was not even a Parisian but the Parisian: a millionaire and an aristocrat from birth, an orphan and an only child, not merely heir in his own right to more francs than any-one knew save the lawyers and bankers who guarded and nursed and incremented them, but to the incalculable weight and influ-ence of the uncle who was the nation's first Cabinet member even though another did bear the title and the precedence, and of that godfather whose name opened doors which (a Comite de Ferrovie chairman's), because of their implications and commi'I'ments, or (a bachelor's) of their sex, gender, even that of a Cabinet Minister could not; who had only to reach majority in order to inherit that matchless of all catastrophes: the privilege of exhausting his life-or if necessary, shortening it-by that matchless means of alclass="underline" being young, male, unmarried, an aristocrat, wealthy, secure by right of birth, in Paris: that city which was the world too, since of all cities it was supreme, dreamed after and adored by all men, and not just when she was supreme in her pride but when-as now-she was abased from it. Indeed, never more dreamed after and adored than now, while in abasement; never more so than now because of what, in any other city, would have been abasement. Never more than now was she, not France's Paris but the world's, the defilement being not only a part of the adored im-mortality and the immaculateness and therefore necessary to them, but since it was the sort of splendid abasement of which only Paris was capable, being capable of it made her the world's Paris: con-quered-or rather, not conquered, since, France's Paris, she was inviolate and immune to the very iron heel beneath which the rest of France (and, since she was the world's Paris too, the rest of the world also) lay supine and abased-impregnable and immune: the desired, the civilised world's inviolate and forever unchaste, virgin barren and insatiable: the mistress who renewed her barren virginity in the very act of each barren recordless promiscuity, Eve and Lilith both to every man in his youth so fortunate and blessed as to be permitted within her omnivorous insatiable orbit; the victorious invading hun himself, bemazed not so much by his success as his sudden and incredible whereabouts, shuffling his hobbled boots in the perfumed anteroom, dreaming no less than one born to that priceless fate on whom, herself immortal, she conferred brief immortality's godhead in exchange for no more than his young man's youth.