From these days, there remain to me these
recollections, whose chief traits I here assemble around one
idea. For, not reckoning for the glory of arms, either on
the present or future, I sought it in the souvenirs of my
comrades. My own little adventures will not serve, except
as frame to those pictures of the military life, and of
the manners of our armies, all whose traits are by no means
known."
'And thus springs up, in the most natural manner, this little
book on the army.
'It has the truth, the delicacy, and the healthiness of a
production native to the soil; the merit of love-letters,
journals, lyric poems, &c., written without any formal
intention of turning life into a book, but because the writer
could not help it. What, more than anything else, engaged the
attention of De Vigny, was the false position of two beings
towards a factitious society: the soldier, now that standing
armies are the mode, and the poet, now that Olympic games
or pastimes are not the mode. He has treated the first best,
because with profounder _connoissance du fait_. For De Vigny
is not a poet; he has only an eye to perceive the existence
of these birds of heaven.
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