rcial people. "The grocer and the ironmonger," he says, "there's
two that know how to go about it! At the beginning of the war there
was a business crisis by the force of things, and they had to tighten
their belts like the rest. Then they got their revenge and swept the
dibs in and hoarded stuff up, and speculated, and they're still
revenging themselves. You should see the stocks of goods they sit on
in their cellars and wait for the rises that the newspapers foretell!
They've got one excuse, it's true--there are others, bigger people,
that are worse. Ah, you can say that the business people will have
given a rich notion of their patriotism during the war!"

The fair young man stretches himself backward to his full length, with
his heels together on the ground, his arms rigid on the table, and
opens his mouth with all his might and for a long time. Then he goes
on in a loud voice, careless who hears him, "Why, I saw the other day,
at the Town Hall, piles of the Declarations of Profits, required by the
Treasury. I don't know, of course, for I've not read them, but I'm as
sure and certain as you are that all those innumerable piles of
declarations are just so many columns of cod and humbug and lies!"

Intelligent and inexhaustible, accurately posted through the clerk's
job in which he is sheltering, the sergeant relates with careless
gestures his stories of scandals and huge profiteering, "while our good
fellows are fighting." He talks and talks, and concludes by saying
that after all _he_ doesn't care a damn as long as they let him alone.

Monsieur Fontan is in the cafe. A woman leads up to him a tottering
being whom she introduces to him. "He's ill, Monsieur Fontan, because
he hasn't had enough to eat."

"Well now! And I'm ill, too," says Fontan jovially, "but it's because
I eat too much."

The sergeant takes his leave, touching us with a slight salute. "He's
right, that smart gentleman," says Crillon to me. "It's always been
like that, and it will always be like that, you know!"

Aloof, I keep silence. I am still tired and stunned by all these
sayings in the little time since I remained so long without hearing
anything but myself. But I am sure they are all true, and that
patriotism is only a word or a tool for many. And feeling the rags of
the common soldier still on me, I knit my brows and realize that it is
a disgrace and a shame for the poor to be deceived as they are.

Crillon is smiling, a