Jérome alone remained perfectly calm; but the great quantity of snow he had swallowed to appease the pangs of ravenous hunger, had inundated his whole body and bony face with a cold sweat. To appease the cravings of his stomach, Doctor Lorquin had bound a handkerchief round his loins, and tightened it more and more. He was seated with his back against the tower, and his eyes closed, though he now and then opened them to say, "We have reached the first--the second--the third stage. One more day, and all will be over!" He then began to declaim about the Druids, Odin, Brahma, Pythagoras, quoting Latin and Greek, and announcing the near transformation of the people of Harberg into wolves, foxes, and animals of all sorts. "For myself," he exclaimed, "I will be a lion! I will eat fifteen pounds of beef every day!" Then renewing his discourse:--"No, I will be a man. I will preach peace, brotherhood, justice. Ah, my friends, we suffer for our own faults. What have we done with the other side of the Rhine for the last ten years? With what right did we set up masters over those peoples? Why did we not exchange our ideas, our sentiments, the produce of our arts and of our industry with theirs? Why did we not approach them like brothers, in place of wishing to subject them to us? We should have been well received. What must they not have suffered, those unhappy people, during those ten years of violence and rapine! Now they are avenged, and it is just! May the malediction of heaven fall on the miserable wretches who get up divisions among peoples in order to oppress them!" After these moments of excitement he would fall exhausted against the wall of the tower, and murmur--"Some bread; oh, only a morsel of bread!" Materne's two sons, crouched in the brushwood, their carbines at their shoulders, seemed to expect the passage of some game which never arrived. Their ceaseless watching alone sustained their expiring strength. Others, bent double with pain, were shivering with cold, and yet were burning with fever: they reproached Jean-Claude with having brought them to the Falkenstein. Hullin, with a superhuman force of character, still went and came, observing what took place in the neighboring valleys, but without saying anything. Occasionally he would advance to the edge of the rock, and with his massive jaws clinched and shining eyes, looked at Yégof, seated before a large fire, on the plains of Bois-de-Chênes, in the midst of a band of Cossacks. Since the arrival of the Germans in the valley of the Charmes, the madman had never quitted his post, but appeared to be watching the agony of his victims. Such was the position of these unfortunate people beneath the open heaven. In the gloom of a prison the torture of hunger is doubtless frightful, but in the broad light of day, in the eyes of a whole country, in face of all the resources of nature, its sufferings are beyond all description.