“If they had any sense, these fellows, I shouldn’t mind so much. But they swallow all the gossip that comes their way. Morning after morning a flight of canards settles upon the fort, and the prisoners spend the rest of the day in roasting them. Do you know what they are all telling one another in the casemates? They declare that the major with four stripes made a raid upon kitchen No. 22, and that he found fifty chops, seventy steaks, a leg of mutton, a lot of fritters, a store of cheese—all pinched by Durupt from the men’s rations. Whereupon the major sent you to the cells under guard of four bayonets! Now you know why these rascals looked at you with angry surprise as you passed along the passage. “When such fellows are really famished, as they are here, seeing that they are jealous and stupid, and, above all, driven out of their senses by starvation, how can you expect them to be anything but idiots? All at once, they see red, and must instantly have a victim. But they are incapable of finding one for themselves. Always some cunning rogues among them point out the victims, indicating as if by chance the men of whom they are jealous, and whom they long to replace. Don’t take it so much to heart. In ten years from now it will all seem to you perfectly natural.” This profession of social faith gives me no pleasure, although to-night the temptation to approve it is only too strong. What an affair! It is precisely the kitchen run by Dutrex and Durupt, men of principle, men who may be said to be scrupulous to excess, before which a noisy demonstration is made, whilst no one attempts to interfere with kitchen No. 53, notoriously privileged by the quartermaster. How mean! And it is Frenchmen, men of intelligence, men quite capable of recognizing the real causes of things, who, inspired by envy and revenge, have directed against No. 22 the vague wrath of hungry stomachs! _Fames malesuada._ Yes, this is what it means, the ambition of a few turning to profit the hunger of all. It is strange, but a clear recognition of the motives that have brought about this storm in a teacup produces in my mind a sort of philosophic disillusionment. My thoughts pass quite beyond the present affair. I find myself dreading all at once lest the great social movements, those I most admire, those I see on the horizon of history, sublime, heroic, superhuman like the Marseillaise of the Arc de Triomphe, may not resemble this trifling affair, which aimed, beneath the standard of justice, at introducing a set of rogues into the heart of the temple of their thoughts, the kitchen.