At length I go to my rooms to rest. I find my lodging just as I left it. I run through it, radiant, then I sit down on the divan and I rest there, ecstatic, beatific, feasting my eyes with the view of my knickknacks and my books. I undress, however; I splash about in a great tub, rejoicing that for the first time in many months I am going to get into a clean bed with white feet and toenails trimmed. I spring onto the mattress, which rebounds. I dive my head into the feather pillow, my eyes close; I soar on full wings into the land of dreams. I seem to see Francis, who is lighting his enormous wooden pipe, and Sister Angèle, who is contemplating me with her little moue; then Reine advances toward me, I awake with a start, I behave like an idiot, I sink back again up to my ears, but the pains in my bowels, calmed for a moment, awake, now that the nerves become less tense, and I rub my stomach gently, thinking that the horrors of dysentery are at last over! I am at home. I have my rooms to myself, and I say to myself that one must have lived in the promiscuosity of hospitals and camps to appreciate the value of a basin of water, to appreciate the solitude where modesty may rest at ease. FOOTNOTES: [6] Military hats. [7] Badinguet, nickname given to Napoleon III; Henri Rochefort, anti-Napoleon journalist and agitator. [8] A suburb of Chalons. [9] Canrobert, a brave and distinguished veteran, head of the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Rhine. [10] Panier seats used in the French army to transport the wounded. [11] Tringlots are the soldiers detailed for this duty. [12] Brandy of thirty-six degrees. [13] Armed police. "BONJOUR, MONSIEUR" BY JEAN RICHEPIN [Illustration] _This poet and teller of tales was born at Médéa, Algeria, in 1849. His tremendous exuberance of spirits at first found an outlet in military service during the war of 1870, and later in a collection of vagabond songs called "La Chanson des Gueux," for which shock to the conventions he was sent to prison for a month. Between 1877 and 1879 he published a variety of ballads while pursuing in picturesque flashes the careers of sailor and lighterman._ _Richepin has written many stories, more or less with a penchant for extraordinary sensations and psychological anomalies. "Nana Sahib" is a play he wrote in 1883, in which, for a short time, he acted the principal rôle with Sarah Bernhardt._ _Richepin is distinguished by his truly subtle use of words, by an unbridled, almost truculent, eloquence, clothed in rich and savory language._ [Illustration] "BONJOUR, MONSIEUR" BY JEAN RICHEPIN