Marshal Hulot

In spite of all Listbeth's care and attention, three days later Marshal Hulot was dead. Such men are the pride of the causes they have embraced. To Republicans the Marshal was the ideal patriot, and they all came to take part in his funeral procession, which was followed by an enormous crowd. The Army, the Government, the Court, the ordinary people, all came to render homage to his high virtue, his untouched integrity, his undimmed glory. Not for the asking do the representatives of a whole nation follow a man's coffin. This funeral was marked by one of those gestures, showing the greatest delicacy, good taste, and true feeling, that from time to time recall the qualities and the glory of the French aristocrats. For, following the Marshal's coffin, the old Marquis de Montauran was to be seen, the brother of the man who in the rising of the Chouans in 1799 had been the opponent, the defeated and fatally wounded opponent, of Hulot. The Marquis, falling under the bullets of the Republican bluecoats, the Blues, had entrusted his young brother's interests to the Republican soldier. Hulot had accepted the nobleman's charge thus laid upon him, and executed it so well that he had succeeded in preserving his estates for the young man, who was at the time an émigré. And for that reason the old French nobility, too, paid their homage to the soldier who nine years before, in 1832, had vanquished Madame, when she tried to recover the throne for her son, the Duc de Berry, by force of arms.