He manifested a childish joy at being made useful and I did not refuse to go with him. After the solitude of the mountain, with its silent nights, we found a secret pleasure in the lighted streets and the coming and going of people. The epidemic had been completely checked; the sanitary measures which had been ordered left not the slightest danger to be feared. Awakened from its nightmare, the town was giving itself over to transports of joy the reaction from terror. I had seen it in its consternation rushing with loud cries to seek salvation in one man, and I found it now in all the heyday and thoughtlessness of a festival. The autumn softness floated like a perfume over all. The shops were lighted up. The pavements were crowded with people and the cafés overflowed to the very street. The women were in light dresses which they had not been able to wear all summer, and jaunty in their fresh costumes transformed the season into a belated spring. After so much mourning life was sweet, and funerals were relegated to the background. I was the son of their saviour. I expected tokens of popular favour, and behold people avoided us, as I was not slow to see. The sight of that old man and that youth forced upon them the thought of their benefactor, and recalled the evil days through which they had passed. Evidently no one wanted to think of them. We should have liked to talk over all the troubles, but no one gave us an opportunity. Finally, some one spoke to us. It was Martinod, Martinod with his pursed-up mouth and sleek beard who, without giving me time to shake him off, began to talk of my father admiringly, eloquently, enthusiastically, awarding him full and entire justice, celebrating his courage, his organising ability, his medical skill, his marvellous art of directing men. I had resolved, on seeing him, to turn my back upon him with contempt, and here I was, full of gratitude, drinking in his words--forgetting his calumnies, his base manœuvres, his secret plots, which had so nearly destroyed the unity of our family. I ought to have been seeking upon his face the mark imprinted by my father’s hand, and here I was listening to his brazen encomiums. I was still too simple minded to imagine what he was designing. Gallus and Merinos, who next met us, were quite ready to descant upon themselves and the cruel trials from which they had fortunately emerged. We tried to speak of poor Casenave and the unlucky Galurin, but they changed the subject by informing us that one of them was composing a Funeral March and the other a _Danse Macabre_, in commemoration of the historic typhus. I have never learned that either was finished.