Presle, advancing with tremendous strides, comes running towards us from the top of the hill.
"I was looking for you, Lieutenant," he exclaims. "I thought you were still up there. A cyclist has just come to say that you are wanted at the paymaster's office. They are sending for all the officers, one after another.... It must be your turn now!"
The paymaster? Of course, this is the last day of the month!
And I am in such frame of mind that I am not at all ill-pleased I should have to go alone. Striding rapidly down the road, I amuse myself watching the larks settling and pecking away in the dust. They let me approach them until I am able to distinguish their sharp, black eyes, their slender claws and their quaint little crests. Then, with a flutter of feathers, a stroke of their wings, they flash away almost from beneath my feet. But they do not go far; lightly they glide down into the nearest field, perch on the top of some molehill, and with head on one side, tranquilly and mockingly watch me. When I have gone on far enough, they return to the road and settle on the spot from which I drove them.
It is midday when I leave the paymaster's office, my money safe in my pocket. I discover that the walk has made me hungry, but the prospect of returning to the valley to eat the inevitable boiled meat and cooked rice--it will already be more than half cold--does not please me. I find the prospect not at all inviting. A sudden longing for dishes dainty and rare, for savoury dishes to be masticated at leisure, seizes me. My liberty of the morning, the comparative freedom of action of which only a short time remains to me, is in itself so unusual and pleasurable a sensation, that I feel the occasion demands some adequate form of celebration. Had I known in advance what was going to befall, I would have made all the essential arrangements, fittingly to mark the occasion. Being a victim of the unforeseen, no choice remains to me; I must extemporize. And since the abnormal yearning for meats tender and juicy obsesses me, I must seek, solitary and alone, to satisfy it.
Fortune is good to me. A white house with sunlit façade attracts my attention. On a garden seat near the door an old man sits, placidly warming himself in the sunshine. No complications bar the way to complete mutual understanding. He invites me to step into a perfect little kitchen; and there his daughter-in-law makes me an omelette never to be forgotten. This is followed by smoked ham, which she cuts specially for me. I eat like a glutton; near my left hand reposes a long baton of new bread, to which I help myself at will. Again and again the old man replenishes my glass with Toul wine, rosy, sparkling and dry. The fresh ham on my plate has a sheen; before me, near my glass, in which the bubbles foam, there is a stone jar of golden jam.