“Sacre bleu!” cries my neighbor, as he stretches himself. “What time can it be?” I awake in turn. The sun will not be late in rising, for the great blue curtain is laced at the horizon with a fringe of rose. What misery! It will be necessary now to go knock at the door of the hospital, to sleep in wards impregnated with that heavy smell through which returns, like an obstinate refrain, the acrid flower of powder of iodoform! All sadly we take our way to the hospital again. They open to us but alas! one only of us is admitted, Francis;--and I, they send me on to the lyceum. This life is no longer possible, I meditate an escape, the house surgeon on duty comes down into the courtyard. I show him my law-school diploma; he knows Paris, the Latin Quarter. I explain to him my situation. “It has come to an absolute necessity.” I tell him “that either Francis comes to the lyceum or that I go to rejoin him at the hospital.” He thinks it over, and in the evening, coming close to my bed, he slips these words into my ear! “Tell them tomorrow morning that your sufferings increase.” The next day, in fact, at about seven o’clock, the doctor makes his appearance; a good, an excellent man, who had but two faults; that of odorous teeth and that of desiring to get rid of his patients at any cost. Every morning the follow-ing scene took place: “Ah, ha! the fine fellow,” he cries, “what an air he has! good color, no fever. Get up and go take a good cup of coffee; but no fooling, you know! don’t go running after the girls; I will sign for you your _Exeat_; you will return to-morrow to your regiment.” Sick or not sick, he sent back three a day. That morning he stops in front of me and says: “Ah! saperlotte, my boy, you look better!” I exclaim that never have I suffered so much. He sounds my stomach. “But you are better,” he murmurs; “the stomach is not so hard.” I protest--he seems astonished, the interne then says to him in an undertone: “We ought perhaps to give him an injection; and we have here neither syringe nor stomach-pump; if we send him to the hospital--?”