n their apartments and avoided all communication with the
officers who were billeted on them; but to him, who was of a sociable
nature and liked to extract from life what enjoyment it had to offer,
this enforced sulkiness in the end became unbearable. His great,
silent house, where the inmates lived apart from one another in a chill
atmosphere of distrust and mutual dislike, damped his spirits terribly.
He began by stopping M. de Gartlauben on the stairs one day to thank him
for his favors, and thus by degrees it became a regular habit with the
two men to exchange a few words when they met. The result was that one
evening the Prussian captain found himself seated in his host's study
before the fireplace where some great oak logs were blazing, smoking
a cigar and amicably discussing the news of the day. For the first two
weeks of their new intimacy Gilberte did not make her appearance in the
room; he affected to ignore her existence, although, at every faintest
sound, his glance would be directed expectantly upon the door of the
connecting apartment. It seemed to be his object to keep his position
as an enemy as much as possible in the background, trying to show he was
not narrow-minded or a bigoted patriot, laughing and joking pleasantly
over certain rather ridiculous requisitions. For example, a demand was
made one day for a coffin and a shroud; that shroud and coffin afforded
him no end of amusement. As regarded other things, such as coal, oil,
milk, sugar, butter, bread, meat, to say nothing of clothing, stoves
and lamps--all the necessaries of daily life, in a word--he shrugged his
shoulders: _mon Dieu!_ what would you have? No doubt it was vexatious;
he was even willing to admit that their demands were excessive, but that
was how it was in war times; they had to keep themselves alive in the
enemy's country. Delaherche, who was very sore over these incessant
requisitions, expressed his opinion of them with frankness, pulling them
to pieces mercilessly at their nightly confabs, in much the same way
as he might have criticised the cook's kitchen accounts. On only one
occasion did their discussion become at all acrimonious, and that was in
relation to the impost of a million francs that the Prussian prefet
at Rethel had levied on the department of the Ardennes, the alleged
pretense of which was to indemnify Germany for damages caused by
French ships of war and by the expulsion of Germans domiciled in French
territory. Se