After dinner the medical officers, especially MM. Langlois, Romant, and Bouvat, come to No. 46. We draw back the curtains. We stretch a string across the room to serve as net, and for an hour we give ourselves up to the joys of chamber-tennis, using our hands as rackets. It is for this reason that the new consulting-room has received the imposing name of Salle du Jeu de Paume. Sometimes, also, it is designated “la chambre des huiles,” _das Oelenzimmer_. Poor Ploss. He cannot get the better of these Frenchmen. He would like to see them yielding, to see them cringe beneath his rod, to see them thoroughly miserable. And yet, whatever he can do, despite their hunger and their fits of the blues, they are cheerful. They sing, they decorate their prison. They are always finding new devices. If they have no tools, they make some. They work unceasingly in wood and stone. All the casemates have tables now, stools, chairs, lockers, water-kegs, draughts, and chessmen. Guiton d’Ancenis and Robert le Bordelais are neither smiths nor carpenters, and yet No. 26 is well furnished. They had no spoons; they “forged” some out of old “bully-beef” tins. They had no forks, but they have cut some from the birches on the slopes. To economize matches, they have made a float-light. To save their fingers from the heat of the boiling soup when it is poured into their bowls, they have fashioned wickerwork saucers. Almost all of them had been compelled to give up their knives; lengths of iron cask-hoop, patiently hammered straight and sharpened, have supplied the lack. Their windows are decorated with tiny pine-trees, planted in herring-boxes. They hope to take them home and grow them in France. Do what he could, Ploss has not been able to stamp out this creative fervour. He knows it, and it infuriates him. Oh, if he had but been commandant! How he would have hunted down without mercy all those concerned in the underground traffic, in the great commercial enterprises by which our illicit supply of provisions has been gradually centralized. There are two such enterprises, and thanks to the competition between them we have for some weeks been securing, at stable and almost reasonable prices, supplementary rations of inestimable value. With what joy he would compel Marin and Brissard to shut up shop, two men who, with a chance armamentarium, have in kitchen No. 42 established a flourishing foundry of tin rings. And Crussol, who puts the finishing touches to the stones which are prepared for him by a whole squad of drillers and escutcheoners, and who has secured a reputation and customers even among the officers at the Ingolstadt headquarters. How promptly would he be dislodged from his niche in the northern parapet, where he works all day in any weather, squatting and mute like a second Paphnuce.