In the morning I felt a great deal better than I thought I would. I was relieved of all work, and after having greased my rifle which became rusted in the rain, I enjoyed a few hours of rest. Stretched out on my blanket, with my body torpid in delicious half slumber where I distinctly heard all the noises of the camp--the sounding of the bugle, the neighing of the horses as if coming from afar--I was thinking of the people and the things I had left behind me. A thousand images and a thousand scenes of the past rapidly filed before my eyes. I saw again the Priory, my dead mother and my father, with his large straw hat and the short beggar with his flaxen hair and Felix squatted in the lettuce patches, lying in wait for a mole. I saw again my study room, my school mates and, topping the noise of the Bal Bullier, Nini, her hair loose and brown, with her ruddy neck and her pink stockings showing like some lascivious flower from under the skirt raised in dancing. Then the image of an unknown woman in a yellow dress, whom I noticed in the shadow of a box in a theatre one evening, came back to me--an insistent and sweet vision. During this time the strongest among us had gone out to roam in the fields and on the farms. They came back merrily carrying bundles of straw, chickens, turkeys and ducks. One of them was driving before him with a switch, a big, grunting pig; another was balancing a sheep on his shoulder. At the end of a halter the latter was also dragging a calf which, tangled up in the rope, resisted comically and shook its snout, bellowing all the time. The peasants came up running to the camp to complain that they had been robbed; they were hooted and driven out. The general, very stiff and with round eyes, came to review us in the afternoon, accompanied by our lieutenant who walked at his right. His shiny look, his flushed cheeks, his mealy voice bore witness to the fact that he had had a plentiful breakfast. He was munching the end of an extinguished cigar; he spat, sniffed, swore. One could not tell at whom or what, for he did not address himself to any one in particular. When standing in front of our company, he looked at our lieutenant-colonel severely, and I heard him say: "Your men are dirty slops!" Then he walked away, his body weighed down by his belly, dragging his feet, dressed in yellow boots above which red breeches swelled and folded like a skirt. The rest of the day was devoted to loitering in the taverns of Belhomert. There was such crowding and such noise everywhere, and besides I knew so well these fights in the cabarets, these violent outbursts as a result of drunkenness which often degenerated into general scuffles, that I preferred to go out on the road, far from all these brawls, in the company of a few peaceable comrades.