Explore "What the Colonel Thought" by Guy De Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"I'm an old man now," said Colonel Laporte. "I've got the gout, and my legs are as stiff as the posts in a fence, but, damme, if a woman, a pretty woman, ordered me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I'd jump into it like a clown through a hoop. That's how I shall die; it's in the blood. I'm a veteran ladies' man, I am, an old buffer of the old school. The sight of a woman, a pretty woman, stirs me to my boots. I give you my word it does.
"And we're all like that, gentlemen, we Frenchmen. We remain knights to our dying day, the knights of love and hazard, now that they've done away with God, Whose real bodyguard we used to be.