From day to day the difficulties of life increase. I have nothing left, neither bread, wine, nor lamp-oil. A month ago, with the sunshine, the house well aired, and the comfort of warmth, these privations were bearable, but now they seem very hard. In the poultry-yard there are only two hens left; always hiding under the rafters to escape the continual driving rain. I make faggots with the branches of the fruit-trees, which, brittle and no longer protected by their leaves, snap off and fall to the ground. The apple-trees have golden moss, the plum-trees long streaks of light-coloured gum under their resinous bark, and they make large, bright fires, throwing a sunshine into their warmth. I have also gathered the last apples, all reddened by the breath of the first frost, and I have made a poor kind of cider, which I drink instead of wine. With my bread I have been less successful. I tried, with the unfortunate Goudeloup’s flour, to knead some dough in the bottom of a cupboard drawer which I used as a trough; and then, under the ashes on the bricks, I made as well as I could, thick cakes, of which the outsides were burnt, and the insides hardly done enough. They reminded me of those little round bits of dough that, as a child, I held in the tongs, and made into rolls about the size of a lozenge. From time to time I get a windfall. For instance, the other day, as I was rummaging in the keeper’s house, I found on a damp and mouldy cupboard shelf a few bottles of walnut-spirit that had been overlooked by the plunderers; and another time I found a large sack, which I opened with a beating heart, thinking it contained potatoes. I was quite startled on pulling out from it magpies’ beaks, vipers’ heads, dry and dust-coloured, squirrels’ tails, with their bushy red fur, and field-mice’s tails, as delicate as silken twist. These are the keeper’s perquisites, as they are given so much for the head and tail of destructive animals. They therefore keep these trophies of the chase very carefully, as they are paid for them by Government once a month. —It always buys tobacco, as good old Guillard used to say. [Picture: Robert exploring cupboards] I must confess that at this moment I would willingly have given up all these old bones in exchange for a few rolls of tobacco. I have only enough to last me two or three days, and that is really the only privation I dread. To me the forest is an inexhaustible larder. When my poultry-yard is empty, I shall be able to snare some of those fine cock-pheasants that come round the Hermitage to pick up the grains of buckwheat hidden in the wet soil. But tobacco! tobacco! . . .