A Most Unsettling Encounter - Otranto 1816

The Baron put his hands on his hips.         “Blast it, what does he want?” he muttered.

     Colonel Lime of the Black Tigers was riding towards him. How the Baron loathed the colonel! He’d plagued him from France to Russia and back again, always asking awkward questions and spreading foul rumours. Why was the world eternally choked with such oafs? Lime was physically intrusive, too, and loud and impossibly fat with huge whiskers - made him look like a walrus stuffed into a doll’s uniform. Worst of all, the Baron knew that Lime suffered from the very worst of afflictions: a chronic sense of honesty  
     “The Austrian attack will soon be getting underway, sir!” shouted the Colonel. “What are you going to do about it?”
     “Haste and rudeness are unseemly companions, sir – especially in the gout-ridden.”  
     “Parzifal, General of our army,” sneered Lime. “You who were supposed to be so big at the Imperial Court in France.”
     “I still am – it’s the Court that’s smaller.”

(The Baron's verbal retort is a play on Gloria Swanson's memorable line in the 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard)