Note 6 — Chapter II · THE DAY OF THE PRESENTATION ON THE FIELD OF MARS

Pigtails, too, were missing; for the first time at a military display of the kind in Paris. Even the soldiers of the Revolution, the rank and file, had kept up the old style of clubbed-hair. The new régime, however, had altered all that. “Le petit tondu” (“The little shorn one”), a camp-fire nickname for Napoleon, from his close-cropped head, had made every soldier cut his hair short; by a general order of six months before. The order, it may be mentioned incidentally, at first nearly raised a riot in the Imperial Guard, and led to a number of duels between “les canichons,” the “lap-dogs” or “poodles,” as the men who obeyed the order at the outset were sneeringly dubbed by comrades who refused to do so, and the others.