The happiest moment in the day is in the early morning, when I leave the sleeping casemate. On the staircases, the lamps are flickering to extinction. The passages, always dark, are filled with the stench from the latrines and with what is sometimes termed a “poor smell.” I make a hasty toilet in the kitchen; take my half-pint of coffee from one of the steaming cauldrons; gulp it down without straining it, Turkish fashion; don my coat and my green cap; mount the stairs leading to the upper courts. At length I am out of doors. Dawn, fresh air, solitude! This morning I was in a frisky mood. Life seemed good. The cold was biting. The white frost endowed the simplest objects with a Christmas purity. I walked smartly along the broad path which surmounts the escarp. When we arrived at the fort, this path, like the other parapets, was covered with moss and turf; but now, through our continual walking on it, the grass has been worn away. It has become a road. Though I am a sociable creature, and delight in company, I find it extraordinarily pleasurable to be alone. I need long hours all to myself. In Paris, at Dully, at Lablachère, I never weary of my workroom, where I see no one before luncheon. The mornings are always too short. I don’t know if I ought to regard it as an obsession, but here, when I have been walking for an hour immersed in thoughts and memories, in solitary enjoyment of the quiet northward landscape of fields and forests, my first encounter with a man causes me real discomfort. I cannot be agreeable before midday. First of all, I made my clandestine and customary visit to your acacias. They grow at the highest point of our domain. A look-out is hidden here. I had long been familiar with a kind of large metal hood which interrupts the long grass for a moment, and projects barely a span above the surface of the soil. Yet had it not been for a recent adventure of two of the prisoners, Noverraz and Laloux, I should never have dreamed that this was a strategic eye, the eye of the fort.