Nor did the French boys fail to think us beastly in return, and
sometimes to express the thought; especially the little vulgar boys,
whose playground was the street--the _voyous de Passy_. They hated our
white silk chimney-pot hats and large collars and Eton jackets, and
called us "sacred godems," as their ancestors used to call ours in the
days of Joan of Arc. Sometimes they would throw stones, and then there
were collisions, and bleedings of impertinent little French noses, and
runnings away of cowardly little French legs, and dreadful wails of "O
la, la! O, la, la--maman!" when they were overtaken by English ones.
Not but what _our_ noses were made to bleed now and then,
unvictoriously, by a certain blacksmith--always the same young
blacksmith--Boitard!
It is always a young blacksmith who does these things--or a young
butcher.
Of course, for the honor of Great Britain, one of us finally licked him
to such a tune that he has never been able to hold up his head since. It
was about a cat. It came off at dusk, one Christmas Eve, on the "Isle of
Swans," between Passy and Grenelle (too late to save the cat).
I was the hero of this battle. "It's now or never," I thought, and saw
scarlet, and went for my foe like a maniac.
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