Chapter XIX
Venice and the Venisons
Getting back again to guides, I am reminded that our acquaintanceship
with the second member of the Mark Twain brotherhood was staged
in Paris. This gentleman wished himself on us one afternoon at
the Hotel des Invalides. We did not engage him; he engaged us,
doing the trick with such finesse and skill that before we realized
it we had been retained to accompany him to various points of
interest in and round Paris. However, we remained under his control
one day only. At nightfall we wrested ourselves free and fled
under cover of darkness to German soil, where we were comparatively
safe.
I never knew a man who advanced so rapidly in a military way as
he did during the course of that one day. Our own national guard
could not hold a candle to him. He started out at ten A.M. by
being an officer of volunteers in the Franco-Prussian War; but
every time he slipped away and took a nip out of his private
bottle, which was often, he advanced in rank automatically. Before
the dusk of evening came he was a corps commander, who had been
ennobled on the field of battle by the hand of Napoleon the Third.
He took us to Versailles. We did not particularly care to go to
Versailles that day, because it was raining; but he insisted and
we went. In spite of the drizzle we might have enjoyed that
wonderful place had he not been constantly at our elbows, gabbling
away steadily except when he excused himself for a moment and
stepped behind a tree, to emerge a moment later wiping his mouth
on his sleeve. Then he would return to us, with an added gimpiness
in his elderly legs, an increased expansion of the chest inside
his tight and shiny frock coat, and a fresh freight of richness
on his breath, to report another deserved promotion.
After he had eaten luncheon - all except such portions of it as he
spilled on himself - the colonel grew confidential and chummy. He
tried to tell me an off-color story and forgot the point of it,
if indeed it had any point. He began humming the Marseillaise
hymn, but broke off to say he expected to live to see the day when
a column of French troops, singing that air, would march up Unter
den Linden to stack their arms in the halls of the Kaiser's palace.
I did not take issue with him. Every man is entitled to his
own wishes in those matters. But later on, when I had seen
something of the Kaiser's standing army, I thought to myself that
when the French troops did march up Unter den Linden they would
find it tolerably rough sledding, and if there was any singing
done a good many of them probably would not be able to join in the
last verse.
