[Footnote 1: Outbreak of the French Revolution.--Tr.]
Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he went away from the now silent ranks. A moment later, as he passed near me, I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved to see tears in his eyes!
He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficulty restrained, and masked by a contraction of the face. He invokes Déroulède, and says that faith comes at will, like the rest. He lives in perpetual bewilderment and distress that everybody does not think as he does. He exerts real influence, for there are, in the multitudes, whatever they may say, beautiful and profound instincts always near the surface.
The captain, who was a well-balanced man, although severe and prodigal of prison when he found the least gap in our loads, considered the adjutant animated by an excellent spirit, but he himself was not so fiery. I was getting a better opinion of him; he could judge men. He had said that I was a good and conscientious soldier, that many like me were wanted.
Our lieutenant, who was very young, seemed to be an amiable, good-natured fellow. "He's a good little lad," said the grateful men; "there's some that frighten you when you speak to them, and they solder their jaws up. But _him_, he speaks to you even if you're stupid. When you talk to him about you and your family, which isn't, all the same, very interesting, well, he listens to you, old man."
St. Martin's summer greatly warmed us as we tramped into a new village. I remember that one of those days I took Margat with me and went with him into a recently shelled house. (Margat was storming against the local grocer, the only one of his kind, the inevitable and implacable robber of his customers.) The framework of the house was laid bare, it was full of light and plaster, and it trembled like a steamboat. We climbed to the drawing-room of this house which had breathed forth all its mystery and was worse than empty. The room still showed remains of luxury and elegance--a disemboweled piano with clusters of protruding strings; a cupboard, dislodged and rotting, as though disinterred; a white-powdered floor, sown with golden stripes and rumpled books, and with fragile débris which cried out when we trod on it. Across the window, which was framed in broken glass, a curtain hung by one corner and fluttered like a bat. Over the sundered fireplace, only a mirror was intact and unsullied, upright in its frame.