"But the departure of my aunt was put off from year to year; and we resolved not to wait till our best days were past, and lived for some four or five years in Christian and true marriage, though it had not received ecclesiastical sanction. Our only trouble was the loss of our four children. At last my aunt betook herself to her last resting-place; and now, for we were again expecting a child, we made preparations to procure an official recognition of our union, though nothing could make it closer than it was already. But see what sublime sentiments were all at once expressed by my good comrades!--the whole corps knew our relations to one another in all its uprightness, and knew me besides. The honor of the corps would suffer under it, they said, if I married a 'person' who had had children before the official recognition of her marriage. They wouldn't have found it in the least offensive had I merely continued the old relations. The logic of this _point d'honneur_ was incomprehensible to my stupid head, as well as to my wife's. But while it merely made mine sit all the firmer on my shoulders, so that I preferred to resign rather than to submit, it threw my poor wife's completely off its balance. We went through the ceremony sadly; the child, which was soon after brought into the world, died within a few months; and since that time the poor creature has been afflicted with the melancholy delusion that she has the ruin of my life upon her conscience. I have tried a hundred times to make it clear to her that I could have wished for nothing better than to be free from the routine of military service, and devote my life to my studies. There are certain points in military history, and also a few technical problems and controversial questions, concerning which I sometimes have a word or two to say in military periodicals; and so, when the wretched campaign of '66 came, in which we had hard work to save the honor of our arms, to say nothing of our having been delightfully fooled by Austria, I thanked the Lord that I was not forced to march with the rest, but had done forever with a trade which can make a man act against his convictions. Since then, we have lived on unmolested, and I devote my spare hours, as you see, to illustrating my prosaic existence according to the best of my ability."