in the Quarter who was felt to be greater
than the rich nobles and fine officers who flashed along the great
streets, or glittered through the boulevards and parks outside. More
than once when Paris was stirred up, and the Quarter seemed on the eve
of an outbreak, a mounted orderly had galloped up to his door with
a letter, requesting his presence somewhere (it was whispered at the
prefect's), and when he returned, if he refused to speak of his visit
the Quarter was satisfied; it trusted him and knew that when he advised
quiet it was for its good. He loved France first, the Quarter next. Had
he not been offered--? What had he not been offered! The Quarter knew,
or fancied it knew, which did quite as well. At least, it knew how he
always took sides with the Quarter against oppression. It knew how he
had gone up into the burning tenement and brought the children down out
of the garret just before the roof fell. It kne-
w how he had jumped into
the river that winter when it was full of ice, to save Raoul's little
lame dog which had fallen into the water; it knew how he had reported
the gendarmes for arresting poor little Aimée just for begging a man in
the Place de L'Opéra for a franc for her old grandmother, who was blind,
and how he had her released instead of being sent to ------. But what
was the need of multiplying instances! He was "the Sergeant," a soldier
of the empire, and there was not a dog in the Quarter which did not feel
and look proud when it could trot on the inside of the sidewalk by him.
Thus the old Sergeant came to be regarded as the conservator of order in
the Quarter, and was worth more in the way of keeping it quiet than all
the gendarmes that ever came inside its precincts. And thus the children
all knew him.
One story that the Sergeant sometimes told, the girls liked to hear,
though the boys did not, becau-