A bottle of _Asti spumante_ is produced by Laferrière, who in a dreamy way remembers that he is _chef de popote_. The stock of champagne is exhausted. Nearly every day, and sometimes twice a day for the past week, have not the radios, plucked out of the air by the commandant, plus the beauteous _communiqués_, necessitated the opening of bottles even unto the last? Sérin, as we drink, all of us paralyzed by the sudden cessation of the world-horror, tells how one of his gendarmes would keep referring to the armistice as “_la Mistie_,” in two words, and we drink to _la Mistie_. But in spite of the too, too simple joke, how still, yet stern was each one’s heart! About this time Toussaint seizes from the stove the marble “hunk” (it’s the only word for it), “_Amor condusse noi_,” and makes as if to throw it at the dead and gone Oberforster’s clock, stopped, as I said, some four years ago at 12.25. Sérin again, with his most childlike expression: “_La Paix a éclaté!_ Peace has broken out, and I will break out worse than peace if I don’t do something!” As I have said, Masevaux at that hour—it had got to be eleven o’clock—was as lustrous as an ink-pot, and all being still the prey of a strange paralysis of feeling, nobody suggested anything. Peace, lovely, precious peace, dreamed of, desired through years of anguish, so _redly_ bought in money of the heart’s blood, was ours! Those crowding hosts gone out into the “dateless night” seemed suddenly to return, the only moving things on a stunned earth. They had not renounced in vain the dear clothing of the flesh. But how could we understand in one moment the immensity of what had happened? Never have I felt myself so small, so almost non-existent—an insect that had fortuitously _not_ been crushed. But the soul’s great converging point _was_ reached. The war was done and won. Men need no longer kill each other by the tens of thousands, nor need women by the millions, because of it, weep. We touched glasses again, but quietly, oh so quietly! Some one sighs and no one speaks. After a while Toussaint, standing by the stove, again fingers “_Amor noi condusse_,” but it is taken out of his hands by one of the officers. Then Sérin suggests waking up the curé, getting the keys of the church, and ringing the bells. Tirman, in authority in the absence of the commandant, still at St.-Amarin, is gripped by that conservatism known to each and every one in command at great moments, and becomes cautious, even suspicious. “_Mais non, c’est peut-être tout de même une blague. Attendons jusqu’à demain._” (He has quite recovered from his naughty word.) Some one insists, “But Headquarters wouldn’t joke about a thing like that.” Tirman, however, sits down at the piano, breaks out into the “Beautiful Blue Danube” and refuses to have the bells rung. Sérin: “But what can one do here at Masevaux, black as the ace of spades and everybody snoring! _A Paris, il y aurait moyen de fêter même si c’est une blague!_”