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Personal Journal of Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lisieux
Sunday, 4 July to Tuesday, 6 July 2297
In transit to Vogelheim by way of Sans Souci
The first full day aboard the Jean Bart began properly.
At 0600, Sergeant Blanc and Miss Cassart presented themselves for exercise with the grim resignation common to soldiers, prisoners, and university students required to attend lectures before breakfast. I joined them for the initial portion, partly to demonstrate seriousness and partly because a man in my position must not allow shipboard comfort to soften him before arrival.
We lack weapons, but not imagination. Rifle drill may be approximated with broom handles. Physical conditioning requires no equipment beyond a floor, gravity, and resentment. Study requires only time and obedience. Of these, time is abundant and obedience uneven.
Once I judged the system sufficiently established, I placed much of its supervision in the Aspirant's hands. If she is to command soldiers one day, she must learn that the first battle is often against boredom, excuses, and the conviction among enlisted men that all instruction is an officer’s revenge upon the innocent.
Blanc saw through this arrangement immediately.
He asked whether the lieutenant’s own program included champagne.
I replied that my duties differed in kind rather than severity.
He laughed.
This may have been disrespectful. It was also not entirely wrong.
The next several days settled into a pattern.
Sergeant Blanc and Miss Cassart maintained the routine. I attended enough sessions to preserve both authority and conscience, then undertook the broader work of shipboard representation. I dined, walked, drank, conversed, listened, and allowed the name Chevalier de Lisieux to do what names are meant to do when one is fortunate enough to inherit a useful one.
I do not apologize for this.
France is not maintained by rifles alone. It is maintained by memory, influence, confidence, credit, marriage, officers, contracts, priests, engineers, bankers, and the invisible web of obligation that convinces one man to assist another before the formal request is even made. My family understands this. I was raised to understand it.
Sergeant Blanc calls it drinking with rich people.
Again, he is not entirely wrong.
My first real acquaintance aboard was Viktor Reinhardt, a Bavarian by birth and, by choice, a resident of France since the war. This fact alone would make him interesting. That he is also intelligent, well connected, and engaged in arms supply, colonial explosives, and engineering equipment makes him useful.
That he drinks well makes him agreeable.
We spoke at length over champagne, then over wine, then over a bottle whose name I will not record because the price was vulgar. Reinhardt works mostly with French and Japanese clients. He has the manner of a man who departed Germany without ceasing to be German, and embraced France without pretending to have been born French. I find this more honest than the usual exile performance.
We discovered a shared admiration for Nicolas Ruffin.
There are men who speak of France as a tax authority, a language, or an unfortunate collection of ministries. I have never understood them. France is not merely where one is born. It is a charge laid upon the living by the dead. Ruffin, whatever else may be said of him, appears to understand this. He has returned confidence where others offered management. Reinhardt believes he may yet restore French industry and colonial prestige to their proper standing.
I hope he is right.
The Franco-German War ended while I was still a cadet.
I write that without contempt for peace. Only a fool wishes his country to bleed for his education.
Yet I would be lying if I claimed there is not, somewhere in me, still a young man in a combat walker by the Somme.
We had prepared for the ultimate sacrifice.
France chose peace instead.
Perhaps wisely.
Wisdom has never been much comfort to young men who wished to be brave.
Afterward I went to the colonies, then to the Legion. There is honor in such service, certainly. But one does not become a hero by shooting at disgruntled settlers with bad boots and worse guns. One becomes experienced, perhaps. One becomes useful. One becomes older.
But one does not find glory for France.
Reinhardt, to his credit, did not mock this.
He introduced me to Étienne Valcour, a man of wealth, appetite, and considerable confidence in his own importance. Valcour is involved in colonial investment and private collecting, including the Ruffin exhibition aboard the ship. We exchanged pleasantries, then promises of future correspondence. Such promises are common currency aboard a liner. Most expire before the next port. A few become fortunes.
First Officer Marc-Antoine Beaulieu also called upon me, ostensibly to ensure that our unusual military party had been properly accommodated. In practice, he made it clear that while the Legion had imposed a rather spartan regimen upon us in expectation of naval transport, no one aboard the Jean Bart expected me to behave as if I were in barracks.
It was delicately done.
My family name had arrived before me, as it often does.
I accepted the clarification with gratitude and did not mention that I had already reached the same conclusion independently.
In the afternoon, our detachment visited the Ruffin Collection. Sergeant Blanc requires culture. Miss Cassart requires opportunities to apply the education for which the army has paid. I require companions who understand that France’s greatness among the stars consists not only in soldiers and colonies, but in science, acquisition, classification, and the courage to look upon the universe and say: we shall understand this too.
Miss Cassart served as our guide.
The collection contains objects from known non-human cultures, disputed pieces, doubtful relics, and several exhibits from Earth’s own past included as warnings against the human tendency to see aliens wherever scholarship has not yet done its work.
Doctor Amélie Sorel, the curator, briefly joined us. She is severe, thin, exact, and possessed of the terrifying calm of a woman who would rather see a passenger shot than allow him to tap a display case. I approve of her priorities. We also met, in passing, several of her staff: a nervous assistant named Danton and a conservator named Masson, both of whom seemed more attached to the artifacts than to the guests.
Miss Cassart became more animated in the gallery than I had yet seen her. She spoke of Pentapod bioglass, Sung instruments, Eber ruins, disputed Xiang objects, and an ugly clay artifact made by a species with three thumbs and no other fingers. It is apparently the subject of much interest by scholars.
Blanc endured all this like a man under artillery fire.
The evening was spent properly dressed and properly fed. I continued my efforts to civilize our party. Blanc resisted civilization, but not dinner. Miss Cassart, once persuaded that the table would not bite her, spoke enough for all three of us.
Then there was Élodie Vannier.
Mme. Vannier has been aboard since Earth and disembarked her American husband at Beta Canum, where business detained him. She continues alone, though not, I think, lonely. She is beautiful in a familiar modern fashion: blonde, blue-eyed, and polished to a degree that suggests both inheritance and intervention. Not unlike Miss Cassart, though Miss Cassart wears the fact as if it were an accusation, while Élodie wears it as a crown.
She is scandalous.
I took to her immediately.
She took to me with equal speed and less caution.
This has not improved Miss Cassart’s opinion of either of us.
I do not particularly care.