CHAPTER I.
Take any young creature of warm, generous disposition, put a military coat on her fair young shoulders, a smart military hat on her head, and hang a little brandy keg over her right hip, and then you have a delightful vivandiere of the grand army—a very honest, decent kind of girl.
Our vivandiere was called the daughter of the regiment, for she knew no other parents than the rough, but warm-hearted soldiers. They found a little child on the field of battle; they nurtured her, and called her “Marie.”
Many units of her collective father were knocked over before Marie grew to be a very pretty girl; but, spite of continual arrivals, seeing their daughter for the first time, there were many who remembered Marie being found, and with her a letter, and nobody better than Sergeant Sulpice—who always kept the letter, and who, in fact, had picked it and Marie up when he was a full private, and quite a new recruit.
Well, they taught Marie to tap her drum at a very early early age, and she tapped it till she was nearly seventeen; and on her birthday, and all other social festivals, she tapped it very loud and fast.
The French were scudding all over Switzerland, and nobody was more frightened, then and there, than the Marquise de Berkenfelt. As a rule, the Swiss opposed the French bravely, but the marquise was a disgrace to her title.
She stood among the villagers of her particular village trembling far move than the young girls. As for the marquise—fifty, if a day!
She could not return to the castle, and yet she could not stay where she was,—and then, the enemy might be down on them in a moment.
“Plan—plan—rataplan,” away in the distance.