And I am in such frame of mind that I am not at all ill-pleased I should have to go alone. Striding rapidly down the road, I amuse myself watching the larks settling and pecking away in the dust. They let me approach them until I am able to distinguish their sharp, black eyes, their slender claws and their quaint little crests. Then, with a flutter of feathers, a stroke of their wings, they flash away almost from beneath my feet. But they do not go far; lightly they glide down into the nearest field, perch on the top of some molehill, and with head on one side, tranquilly and mockingly watch me. When I have gone on far enough, they return to the road and settle on the spot from which I drove them. It is midday when I leave the paymaster's office, my money safe in my pocket. I discover that the walk has made me hungry, but the prospect of returning to the valley to eat the inevitable boiled meat and cooked rice--it will already be more than half cold--does not please me. I find the prospect not at all inviting. A sudden longing for dishes dainty and rare, for savoury dishes to be masticated at leisure, seizes me. My liberty of the morning, the comparative freedom of action of which only a short time remains to me, is in itself so unusual and pleasurable a sensation, that I feel the occasion demands some adequate form of celebration. Had I known in advance what was going to befall, I would have made all the essential arrangements, fittingly to mark the occasion. Being a victim of the unforeseen, no choice remains to me; I must extemporize. And since the abnormal yearning for meats tender and juicy obsesses me, I must seek, solitary and alone, to satisfy it. Fortune is good to me. A white house with sunlit façade attracts my attention. On a garden seat near the door an old man sits, placidly warming himself in the sunshine. No complications bar the way to complete mutual understanding. He invites me to step into a perfect little kitchen; and there his daughter-in-law makes me an omelette never to be forgotten. This is followed by smoked ham, which she cuts specially for me. I eat like a glutton; near my left hand reposes a long baton of new bread, to which I help myself at will. Again and again the old man replenishes my glass with Toul wine, rosy, sparkling and dry. The fresh ham on my plate has a sheen; before me, near my glass, in which the bubbles foam, there is a stone jar of golden jam. And when the ham at last only too obviously reveals the force and verve of my attack, when the jam-pot is half emptied, I light my pipe with a sigh of deep satisfaction. It is I who have enjoyed these delicacies, I alone. Through half-closed eyes I watch the blue smoke mounting to the rafters, swamped in a sensation of physical well-being, and evoke a picture of my comrades back in the valley, sitting down to the eternal stew and cooked rice--something of remorse, I must confess it, mingles with my self-satisfaction! _Thursday, October 1st._