e Marseillaise were dying. We heard
Brisbille, drunk, hammering with all his might on his anvil. The same
old shadows and the same lights were taking their places in the houses.
It seemed that ordinary life was coming back as it had been into our
corner after six days of supernatural disturbance, and that the past
was already stronger than the present.

Before mounting our steps we saw, crouching in front of his shop door
by the light of a lamp that was hooded by whirling mosquitoes, the mass
of Crillon, who was striving to attach to a cudgel a flap for the
crushing of flies. Bent upon his work, his gaping mouth let hang the
half of a globular and shining tongue. Seeing us with our parcels, he
threw down his tackle, roared a sigh, and said, "That wood! It's
touchwood, yes. A butter-wire's the only thing for cutting that!"

He stood up, discouraged; then changing his idea, and lighted from
below by his lamp so that he flamed in the evening, he extended his
tawny-edged arm and struck me on the shoulder. "We said war, war, all
along. Very well, we've got war, haven't we?"

In our room I said to Marie, "Only three days left."

Marie came and went and talked continually round me, all the time
sewing zinc buttons onto the new pouch, stiff with its dressing. She
seemed to be making an effort to divert me. She had on a blue blouse,
well-worn and soft, half open at the neck. Her place was a great one
in that gray room.

She asked me if I should be a long time away, and then, as whenever she
put that question she went on, "Of course, you don't a bit know." She
regretted that I was only a private like everybody. She hoped it would
be over long before the winter.

I did not speak. I saw that she was looking at me secretly, and she
surrounded me pell-mell with the news she had picked up. "D'you know,
the curate has gone as a private, no more nor less, like all the
clergy. And Monsieur the Marquis, who's a year past the age already,
has written to the Minister of War to put himself at his disposition,
and the Minister has sent a courier to thank him." She finished
wrapping up and tying some toilet items and also some provisions, as if
for a journey. "All your bits of things are there. You'll be
absolutely short of nothing, you see."

Then she sat down and sighed. "Ah," she said, "war, after all, it's
more terrible than one imagines."

She seemed to be having tragic presentiments. Her face was paler than