Brissot is light-hearted, firm, bold, definite, gently peremptory, perfectly self-reliant; he is a surprising compound of boy and of leader, of artist and tradesman, endowed with a lively will; how can any one who is in the dumps resist Brissot? I accompany him to the parapet. Positively she is there, a sort of Munich Flora, short and plump, with great black eyes, whom he calls his “bonne amie,” walking upon the footpath of the glacis, accompanied by three bare-headed village girls and a troop of children. “Damn the escort!” says my _hübscher Franzose_ in an aside. The conversation is opened; it is as innocent as the arched forehead and rounded cheeks of the three slatterns. One of them is in high spirits to know that her affianced is safe. He has been made prisoner, and she has just received her first letter, dated from Gap. She asks if I am betrothed, if the ring I wear (Véron, the corporal in the engineers, cast it for me a few days back out of one of the metal buttons of the coat of a chausseur à pied) is an engagement ring, and why it is made of silver. Brissot takes the initiative in the reply, saying with an air of disgust that it is not silver but platinum, a metal far more costly than gold. She is astonished. She has never heard of platinum. The conversation continues, agreeably stupid. Then the children ask for French pfennigs. “You shall have some if you will give us a newspaper in exchange.” The answer is not new to them; of course they have one ready. They roll it round a stone and throw it across the great ditch. The paper is four days old, but we throw back some sous which fall behind them some way down the glacis. Children and slatterns rush greedily to pick them up. Brissot, profiting by this moment of freedom, says to his Flora of the great eyes: “Come again to-morrow, and without your companions, who are not worthy of you!” “My dear fellow,” I say to him, “I leave you to your love affairs. Farewell.”