La Pérouse’s room looked on to the street. It was small but decent. On the bedside table, I noticed, next a prayer book, the case of pistols, which he had insisted on taking with him. He seized me by the arm, and pushing aside the bed a little: “There! Now!... Put your ear to the wall.... Can you hear it?” I listened for a long time with the greatest attention. But notwithstanding the best will in the world, I could not succeed in hearing anything. La Pérouse grew vexed. Just then a van drove by, shaking the house and making the windows rattle. “At this time of day,” I said, in the hopes of pacifying him, “the little noise that irritates you is drowned by the noise of the street....” “Drowned for you, because you can’t distinguish it from the other noises,” he exclaimed with vehemence. “As for me, I hear it all the same. In spite of everything, I go on hearing it. Sometimes I am so exasperated by it that I make up my mind to speak to Azaïs or to the landlord.... Oh, I don’t suppose I shall get it to stop.... But, at any rate, I should like to know what it is.” He seemed to reflect for a few moments, then went on: “It sounds something like a nibbling. I’ve done everything I can think of not to hear it. I pull my bed away from the wall. I put cotton wool in my ears. I hang my watch (you see, I’ve put a little nail there) just at the place where the pipe (I suppose) passes, so that its ticking may prevent my hearing the other noise.... But then it’s even more fatiguing, because I have to make an effort to distinguish it. Absurd, isn’t it? But I really prefer to hear it without any disguise, since I know it’s there all the same.... Oh! I oughtn’t to talk to you in this way. You see, I’m nothing but an old man now.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, and stayed for some time, as though sunk in a kind of dull misery. The sinister degradation of age is not so much attacking La Pérouse’s intelligence as the innermost depths of his nature. The worm lodges itself in the fruit’s core, I thought, as I saw him give way to his childish despair, and remembered him as he used to be, so firm--so proud. I tried to rouse him by speaking of Boris. “Yes, his room is near mine,” said he, raising his head. “I’ll show it to you. Come along.” He preceded me along the passage and opened a neighbouring door. “The other bed you see there is young Bernard Profitendieu’s.” (I judged it useless to tell him that Bernard had left that very day, and would not be coming back to sleep in it.) He went on: “Boris likes having him as a companion and I think he gets on with him. But, you know, he doesn’t talk to me much. He’s very reserved.... I am afraid the child is rather unfeeling.” He said this so sadly that I took upon myself to protest and to say that I could answer for his grandson’s warmheartedness. “In that case, he might show it a little more,” went on La Pérouse.