"Goddamn," Augereau breathed, now that it was safe to speak aloud. "Chilly fucking blue eyes he has. Did you notice?"

"Alert as an eagle, Charles. Rapt, I think the 'aristos' once called it." Massena agreed. "Impatient. Restless."

"You know, Andre, I can't understand it," Augereau grunted almost in awe. "Been a soldier all my life…"

That wasn't strictly the truth; he'd flogged stolen watches on the streets of Turkish Istanbul, taught dancing in the provinces for a time, soldiered in the French and Russian Armies-eloped with a Greek woman to Lisbon, too.

"… but damned if that little bugger doesn't half scare the piss out of me all of a sudden!"

Their general dictated, arms folded close about his chest, each hand clutching the opposite elbow, head down and pacing slowly. Rarely did he sit for long, Andoche Junot thought with a sigh as he scribbled. Their general was possessed of a rather bad hand. When excited, or wrought by cautious care, his penmanship was almost illegible, and his French still littered with Italian-Corsican misspellings. His speech was laced with mispronunciations of even common words or place-names he'd heard over a hundred times. Perhaps he was cautious now, so as not to appear the stupid, dirty Corsican yokel he'd first been when he began school in France. Andoche Junot shrugged.

"… have been received by the army with signs of pleasure and the confidence owed to one who was known to have merited your trust," the general concluded the letter to the Directory. "The usual close, Junot. And the blah-blah-blah."