How it opens
You came to Sicily in the spring of 1806, a lieutenant of two years' service, and were told within the month that you were to be aide-de-camp to the General.
It was a staff appointment without a staff, a horse without a forage allowance, and a desk made of dispatches that arrived in four languages and left in one.
An aide-de-camp, my dear boy, is a pair of legs with a memory and a discretion. Cultivate the legs first, they are the only part the General will praise.
Choose
Be seen everywhere, and understood nowhere.
Keep your own counsel and one informant, and let the town do the rest.
Court the consuls' dragomen, who translate everything twice.