I had nothing to do but hold my tongue, so I did, like one thunderstruck. Unfortunately the eloquent rascal took it into his head to turn his stay in France to account. Are we to suppose he thought he would thus acquire a few niceties of speech of which he was ignorant? Nobody knows. But he was often to be seen seated in the big kitchen, devoutly listening to the conversation of the workers, to the stories of the old people of the farm, to whom Mme. Lantois spoke sharply when they lingered too long. The lieutenant knew how to listen, how to learn, how to remember what he heard. For one day we heard him say, thumping his fist on the table: "Je savions ce que je disions!" Among our guests were a great many sybarites. Is Barbu's love of creature comforts still remembered? And the many cushions necessary to uphold his person? Can you imagine that some of them, before choosing their room, felt the elasticity of the mattresses, tried the softness of the blankets, inspected the fineness of the sheets? Are the nice afternoon-naps already forgotten? "We are at war! but that is no reason to give up comfort. Let us have carpets and cushions, wadding and down! We are sybarites!" The category, to which we come now, the brutes, is the most scandalously celebrated. The present war has been its triumph. I must say we never saw these gentlemen at their best, such as they showed themselves in assaults, in pillage, in massacre, in arson. We did see them as brutes in their treatment of a peaceful, submissive, terrified population,--brutes who thought they had drawn in their claws. Bouillot, for instance, was a beautiful specimen of the kind, but we saw many another. For instance, there was the hero, who had a small boy of Jouville bound fast to a post during an icy cold afternoon. There was that other who knocked down the shepherd-boy of Aulnois, and gave him a good horse-whipping. The poor boy had gone beyond the frontier of the commune with his cattle: "What am I to do?" he said. "My master's meadow is in Vivaise. I must feed my flock, and at the office they won't give me a pass. They say I don't want one to go those few steps."