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excessively. The condition of his mustache attested to the extreme nature of his evening. Any man would have laughed at Delvigne. We were stationed in northern Africa, where we were campaigning with the French chasseurs, and rain was a rarity. We had rain that day, and so it was fair to expect that we would not have rain for much longer. But I did not laugh. Rather, I shouted to the operator and told him to cancel the message; the moment that Delvigne spoke I became certain that it was in fact raining. Delvigne never got the weather wrong. This was only one of his talents: he was also a powerful chess player, a crack shot, and the strongest officer I knew. He was prodigious in many ways, to be sure. But he was lazy and dissolute and preferred to lounge in bed carping about his headache and remembering the scent of the previous night’s nurse. So I shouted to the operator and told him to cancel the telegraph. This drew a laugh from Delvigne, and that was followed by a long groan. Delvigne told me that he believed he was suffering from more than the pain of the previous night. “I think I am burning alive from fever,” he said. “My eyes are boiling in my head. I remember when my dear departed mother would care for me.” He retched off to the side of the bed, into an upside-down hat. “Boiling,” he said.
    Here I should pause, while you think about this single point of similarity between Delvigne and yourself: both lost mothers young. For many years, this was not a point of pitiful pride with Delvigne; he had not always been a sot and a fool. Fifteen years earlier, he was a capable commander who dressed sharply, had nearly perfect recall when it came to the recent military history of the nation, and was so fleet of foot that he could outrun a horse over a distance of one kilometer. I am not employing hyperbole here. In March of 1835, Captain Henri-Gustave Delvigne outran a horse for one kilometer and had enough time left over to scramble up a tree and leap down from a branch onto the bare back of the horse he had just bested. Now that was a soldier! That was a man! He had a taste for the ladies, but the ladies had a taste for him in return. I had heard tales of Delvigne’s appetites; I remember remarking to another captain that if I had a daughter I would not object if she ended up arranged compromisingly on Delvigne’s divan. I do not feel that way any longer, but I am not as far from it as I imagined I might be when my feelings started to change. If you, my dear one, responded to this letter with a brief note, “Father: With Delvigne,” I would feel only a twinge of rage rather than the consuming spasm that would be more appropriate to the news. Delvigne was, as I have said, a man with substance.
    All of this, and a designer of tools of war as well. Back in those days, Delvigne contrived of a rifle barrel with a separate gunpowder chamber located at the breech and separated from the rest of the barrel by a rigid metal lip. After powder was packed into that chamber, a round bullet was pushed down the barrel and hammered into place with a ramrod, an act which, while flattening the bullet to fit the rifling grooves, also distorted it so that it flew crooked when fired. To permit continued use of this type of barrel, Delvigne invented a new shape for the bullet—it was longer and cylindrical, and expanded more evenly when beaten with the ramrod. This was an improvement, but not enough of an improvement, and the army did not take it up. Instead, they adopted a rifle designed by Colonel Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin, who had in fact only slightly modified Delvigne’s design. It was as if a painter had added a mole to the face of a portrait and was credited with the entire canvas. Delvigne was not bitter. In those days he had no need to be. He was a man with everything around him. He went back to his perfectly tailored coats, to his wine, and to the women who awaited him when he returned home from the field of battle.
    Now,