Général Patrice de MacMahon
Général Patrice de MacMahon, a French officer lately returned from the Crimean war, is a man marked at once by charm and by a certain studied ease of manner. He goes always in the modern dress — trousers and a waistcoat — though he will as often as not dispense with a formal tie; his long, salt-and-pepper curls are kept well-groomed, a testament to his care for his own appearance, even when the mornings after a night's wine leave him somewhat dishevelled.
At a dinner given at Thymbra Farm he is welcomed by Osman Hamdi Bey and the Calvert family, and Osman commends the courteous service he has rendered. He carries a conversation without visible effort, dispensing well-sanitised tales of his campaigns — meditations upon war and victory that find their warmest reception in the French tongue — and his curiosity shows plainly when he enquires after the local excavations, and above all after a certain notable find, a megaron, in which the ancient world quickens his interest.
The following morning finds the general upon the terrace beside Rufus Dimitrious, the pair of them nursing the wreckage of the night before. They trade light banter until a flowering tree without loses of a sudden all its colour, to the alarm of the guests nearby. His early habits may leave him a little in his cups, yet his charm and his inquisitiveness remain whole, the more so when he is drawn to consider the leached and blanched tree before them. He treats the marvel lightly, laying its oddity to the eccentricities of the company about him — and yet, within, he knows well enough that something is amiss.
The general keeps company with the explorers and researchers, Rufus among them, and takes his part in the talk of what might yet be unearthed and of the ancient histories touching Troy. He does not lead the search after the missing, but he goes along with those who do, a man in whom military authority and an idle charm are mingled — an engaged yet curiously detached presence, ever attentive and ever a little apart from the strange workings he meets.