The company was in command of a captain named Martin, a pupil of the painter David, the Convention member. Martin had enrolled after the days of September and at once left for the front. He had already advanced through all the elective ranks. Twice wounded, full of bravery and dash, and knowing how to win obedience in the moment of action, Captain Martin showed himself always jovial, open, and engaging in his relations with the volunteers. Although he had now followed war for fifteen months, David's young pupil did not renounce his former profession. He only awaited peace to lay down his sword, take up his brushes, and attempt to open a new field in his art by depicting the battles of the Revolution, and episodes of camp life. Seated at one corner of a table that was lighted by an iron lamp, Captain Martin was even now amusing himself with sketching, in a little pocket sketch-book, the figure, at once pitiable and grotesque, of the frightened innkeeper. Although a native of Alsace, the latter spoke an unintelligible dialect, and understood no French. Castillon, who was addressing him, indicated with a gesture a young volunteer in spick-and-span new uniform, scrupulously combed and shaven, and altogether looking, as they say, as if he had stepped out of a band-box, and explained: "This citizen asks for twenty bottles of Moselle wine, to be paid for, of course. Isn't what I'm saying to you clear enough--barbarian!" To which the innkeeper, multiplying his manifestations of distress, replied in an agonizing jargon. "But, Gott's t'under, ve vant vine! Ve temant vine of you!" retorted Castillon impatiently, assuming a German patois in the hope of making himself understood. It was Captain Martin who cut the gordian knot and ended the already too-long debate. Hastily outlining in his sketch-book a bottle and a glass, he waved the drawing under mine host's eyes together with an assignat[14] which he drew from his pocket. The Alsatian gave a sigh of relief, motioned that he at last comprehended, and was about to scamper off to his cellar when the captain held him back, and, to prevent any further misunderstanding, drew the figure 20 underneath the picture of the bottle. To this new intelligence the tavernkeeper responded with uncouth contortions of delight, and a formidable "Yah!" "The animal!" exclaimed Castillon, shrugging his shoulders, "why couldn't he answer like that right off!" And addressing himself to the new recruit: "If our innkeeper weren't such a booby, we would have been able to drink your welcome to the battalion half an hour ago, Citizen Duresnel." "True; but then we would have already drunk it, while now we have still in store the pleasure of putting it down," replied Duresnel thickly, as if he had a hot potato in his mouth, and dropping all his r's like one who had never seen Paris.