ers, too. We always had them, we had. We sell them
everything they want. Only, voila, sometimes they get drunk."

"Tell me, little one, come here a bit," says Cocon, taking the boy
between his knees. "Listen now. Your papa, he says, doesn't he, 'Let's
hope the war goes on,' eh?" [note 2]

"Of course," says the child, tossing his head, "because we're getting
rich. He says, by the end of May, we shall have got fifty thousand
francs."

"Fifty thousand francs! Impossible!"

"Yes, yes!" the child insists, stamping, "he said it to mamma. Papa
wished it could be always like that. Mamma, sometimes, she isn't sure,
because my brother Adolphe is at the front. But we're going to get him
sent to the rear, and then the war can go on."

These confidences are disturbed by sharp cries, coming from the rooms
of our hosts. Biquet the mobile goes to inquire. "It's nothing," says
he, coming back; "it's the good man slanging the woman because she
doesn't know how to do things, he says, because she's made the mustard
in a tumbler, and he never heard of such a thing, he says."

We get up, and leave the strong odor of pipes, wine, and stale coffee
in our cave. As soon as we have crossed the threshold, a heaviness of
heat puffs in our faces, fortified by the mustiness of frying that
dwells in the kitchen and emerges every time the door is opened. We
pass through legions of flies which, massed on the walls in black
hordes, fly abroad in buzzing swarms as we pass: "It's beginning again
like last year! Flies outside, lice inside.--"

"And microbes still farther inside!"

In a corner of this dirty little house and its litter of old rubbish,
its dusty debris of last year and the relics of so many summers gone
by, among the furniture and household gear, something is moving. It is
an old simpleton with a long bald neck, pink and rough, making you
think of a fowl's neck which has prematurely molted through disease.
His profile is that of a hen, too--no chin and a long nose. A gray
overlay of beard felts his receded cheek, and you see his heavy
eyelids, rounded and horny, move up and down like shutters on the dull
beads of his eyes.

Barque has already noticed him: "Watch him--he's a treasure-seeker. He
says there's one somewhere in this hovel that he's stepfather to.
You'll see him directly go on all-fours and push his old phizog in
every corner there is. Tiens, watch him."

With the aid of his stick, the old man proceeded to take methodica