CHAPTER II

UNCLE Doubtless you wonder how a man may be an Etonian one year and a trooper in a French Hussar Regiment the next. I am a Frenchman, I am proud to say; but my dear mother, God rest her soul, was an Englishwoman; and my father, like myself, was a great admirer of England and of English institutions. Hence my being sent to school at Eton. On my father's death, soon after I had left school, my uncle sent for me. He was even then a General, the youngest in the French Army, and his wife is the sister of an extremely pr…