KING UMBERTO
Monday, 3d.
At ten o'clock precisely my father, looking from the window, saw Coretti, the wood-seller, and his son waiting for me in the square. So he said:—
“There they are, Enrico; go and see your King.”
I went like a flash. Both father and son were even more alert than usual, and they never seemed to me to resemble each other so strongly as this morning. The father wore on his jacket the medal for valor between two commemorative medals, and his moustaches were curled and as pointed as two pins.
We at once set out for the railway station, where the King was to arrive at half-past ten. Coretti, the father, smoked his pipe and rubbed his hands. “Do you know,” said he, “I have not seen him since the war of 'sixty-six? A trifle of fifteen years and six months. First, three years in France, and then at Mondovi, and here, where I might have seen him, I have never had the good luck of being in the city when he came. Such a piece of luck!”
He called the King “Umberto”, like a comrade. Umberto commanded the 16th division; Umberto was twenty-two years and so many days old; Umberto mounted a horse thus and so.
“Fifteen years!” he said vehemently, quickening his pace. “I really have a great desire to see him again. I left him a prince; I see him once more, a king. And I, too, have changed. From a soldier I have become a hawker of wood.” And he laughed.
