He refused to travel
in the same carriage with the noble Earl, saying openly and impudently
that he preferred the society of honest old soldiers to such a crew as
ours. L'Echelle, still sitting on the hedge, as I fancied, got in with
the Colonel and his escort.
On reaching Aix-les-Bains, we found the omnibus that did the _service
de la ville_, but the Colonel refused to enter it, and declared he
would walk; he cared nothing for the degradation of appearing in the
public streets as a prisoner marching between a couple of gendarmes.
He gloried in it, he said; his desire was clearly to turn the whole
thing into ridicule, and the passers-by laughed aloud at this
well-dressed gentleman, as he strutted along with his hat cocked, one
hand on his hip, the other placed familiarly on the sergeant's arm.
He met some friends, too,--one was a person rather like himself, with
the same swaggering high-handed air, who accosted him as we were
passing the corner of the square just by the Hotel d'Aix.
"What ho! Basil my boy!" cried the stranger. "In chokey? Took up by
the police? What've you done? Robbed a church?"
"Come on with us and you'll soon know.
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