MARIE TETE DE BOIS, THE SUTTLER. 



" THAT I am not handsome may be very possible j but this I can 

 boast, that I am the daughter, wife, mother, and widow of a trooper." 

 She who invariably made this answer to all those who, with very 

 little gallantry but not without reason, accused her of being not the 

 most lovely of women, displayed during forty years more disinter- 

 ested zeal in the service of France than many illustrious personages 

 who, at the period of her death, talked loudly of their devotion. 



Marie Tete de Bois was a suttler ; not one of those " petite mai- 

 tresse" as they were facetiously called in the French army, who 

 possessed a horse and cart, who regularly changed their linen, and 

 who carried on their business, commodiously seated in their vehicle, 

 sheltered from the wind and rain. Marie went on foot like her cus- 

 tomers, and wore the garter and the " soulier a poellettes" of the in- 

 fantry soldier. She smelt strongly of brandy, of tobacco, of garlic 

 of every thing, in fact, that is peculiar to a regiment on its march 

 under every change of good or bad weather. When Marie spoke, in 

 order to be certain that the words that struck your organs of hearing 

 emanated from the mouth of a woman, it was absolutely necessary to 

 fix your eyes with some degree of intensity upon her tri-coloured 

 petticoat, the only insignia of her sex; for, without this"precaution, you 

 might have supposed they proceeded from a moustacioed dragoon. 

 Marie's face strongly resembled one of those wooden blocks that are 

 still to be seen in the shops of village barbers ; the nose of which had 

 been knocked off and the mouth widened. Hence her nom de guerre 

 of Marie Tete de Bois. Her ideas of cleanliness were peculiar. One 

 morning at the bivouac, a soldier remarked to her by chance, at the 

 moment she was pouring out a dram, that the only small glass she 

 used in her trade bore visible traces of the negligence of the cus- 

 tomers who had preceded him ; Marie was observed to thrust her 

 four fingers and thumb into the glass, and, by sundry rotatory move- 

 ments, apeing the manner of a Parisian waiter ; then holding it up to 

 the light, "There, you rascal," said she, "there's a sparkler fit 

 for the Emperor !" 



Our heroine was born at the Hotel des Invalids, long before the 

 revolution. Her father, who had lost his sight in the service, was a 

 pensioner ; and we must suppose that it was owing to the blindness 

 of her parent that she owed the knowledge of a host of things women 

 scarcely learn before arriving at the age of maturity. 



She made her first campaign with the army of the Meuse and 

 Sambre. Growing tired, to use her own forcible expression, of giving 

 the " bell'ful" to her old father, she took flight under the protection 

 of a dummer, who flattered himself he had the honour of leading the 

 French guards to the charge. Not that Marie was ungrateful ; she 

 possessed an excellent heart, and so long as her father lived, she re- 

 gularly sent him her little savings. But she was kept too closely at 

 the " hotel " and feeling herself born for independence, she left to 

 her mother, a washerwoman, the care of administering to the wants 



