Excerpt from The Narrative of Captain Coignet: Soldier of the Empire, 1776-1850
Jean-Roch Coignet was pre-eminently what is called a thoroughgoing man. Whether as shepherd or wagoner, stable-boy or farm hand, soldier or captain, we find him always ready to do his best. Whether using a broom or drawing a sabre, he brings to bear all his mind, all his buoyancy of spirit, and all his pride. Consequently, the perusal of his life rests one as does the company of good reliable men, upon whose devotion one can always count.
It will be seen that his life was not without adventures, and that he knows how to relate them unusually well. One is not a story, teller at will. It is a natural gift, like the color-sense of the great masters, and without it a well-educated person will often find nothing to tell about a journey which an illiterate man so gifted will describe in the most eloquent manner. Our old captain was one of those who possessed this gift. He was uneducated, and he acknowledges the fact without hesitation. He did not know how to read or write until he was thirty-five years old. It was with great difficulty that, at the age of seventy-two, he traced the big schoolboy characters which cover the nine blank-books of his manuscript.
How could he, at seventy-two, remember so many minute details? The fact is less surprising than it appears: in the first place, the memory of early years becomes more vivid as age increases, and in the second place, Coignet had related his memories all his life long before writing them. Just so the bards of Homer recited his "Iliad."
Are Coignet"s memorials valuable as a book of history? I do not go to them any more than to the "Iliad" to verify facts, as we say. I do not even stop to discuss or rectify their statements. Their interest is altogether of another kind. As is the case with all those who do the fighting, our soldier knew not how to give a detailed account of the operations of an army: but he gives us what we could never learn from the exact report of the chief of staff.
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