Meanwhile, Maurice Levasseur had begun to chat again with his brother-in-law Weiss, and his cousin Honoré Fouchard, the quartermaster. The tattoo party, coming from afar off with its numbers gradually strengthened, passed near them, drumming and trumpeting in the melancholy twilight peacefulness; and yet they did not seem to hear it even. Grandson of a hero of the First Napoleon's armies, Maurice was born at Le Chêne Populeux, in the Argonne. His father, being turned away from the paths of glory, had sunk down to a meagre tax-collectorship; and his mother, a peasant woman, had expired in bringing him and his twin sister, Henriette, into the world. If Maurice had enlisted in the army, it was because of grave offences, the outcome of a course of dissipation in which his weak, excitable nature had embarked at the time when he had repaired to Paris to read for the bar, and when his relatives had pinched and stinted themselves to make a gentleman of him. But he had squandered their money in gaming, on women, and on the thousand and one follies of the all-devouring city, and his conduct had hastened his father's death. His sister, after parting with her all to pay his debts, had been lucky enough to secure a husband, that honest fellow Weiss, an Alsatian of Mulhausen, who had long been an accountant at the refinery of Le Chêne Populeux, and was now an overseer in the employ of M. Delaherche, owner of one of the principal cloth-weaving establishments of Sedan. Maurice, who with his nervous nature was seized as promptly with hope as with despair, who was both generous and enthusiastic, but utterly devoid of stability--the slave indeed of each shifting, passing breeze--imagined that he was now quite cured of his follies. Fair and short, with an unusually large forehead, a small nose and chin, and generally refined features, he had grey, caressing eyes, in which there gleamed at times a spark of madness. Weiss had hastened to Mulhausen on the eve of hostilities, having suddenly become desirous of settling some family affair; and if he had availed himself of Colonel de Vineuil's kindness, in order to shake hands with his brother-in-law, Maurice, it was because the colonel happened to be the uncle of young Madame Delaherche, a pretty widow, whom the cloth merchant of Sedan had married the year before, and whom both Maurice and Henriette had known when she was a child, her parents then being neighbours of their own. Besides the colonel, Maurice had come across another of Madame Delaherche's connections in the person of Captain Beaudoin, who commanded his company, and who had been this lady's most intimate friend, it was insinuated, at the time when she was Madame Maginot of Mézières, wife of M. Maginot, inspector of the State forest. 'Mind you kiss Henriette for me,' said Maurice, again and again--he was, indeed, passionately fond of his sister--'tell her she will have every reason to be pleased, and that I want to make her proud of me.'