He picked them up in the train, no doubt. All night long he scratched himself, turning from side to side without sleeping. He felt them creeping up and down his legs, tickling the small of his back, inoculating him with fever. As he had a sensitive skin, their bites rose in exuberant swellings, which he inflamed with unrestrained scratching. He lit his candle over and over again; he got up, took off his night-shirt and put it on again, without being able to kill a single one. He hardly caught a fleeting glimpse of them; they continually escaped him, and even when he succeeded in catching them, when he thought they were flattened dead beneath his finger-nail, they suddenly and instantaneously blew themselves out again and hopped away as safe and lively as ever. He was driven to regretting the bugs. His fury and exasperation of the useless chase effectually wrecked every possibility of sleep. All next day the bites of the previous night itched horribly, while fresh creepings and ticklings showed him that he was still infested. The excessive heat considerably increased his discomfort. The carriage was packed to overflowing with workmen, who drank, smoked, spat, belched and ate such high-smelling victuals that more than once Fleurissoire thought he was going to be sick. And yet he did not dare leave the carriage before reaching the frontier, for fear that the workmen might see him get into another and imagine they were incommoding him; in the compartment into which he next got, there was a voluminous wet-nurse, who was changing her baby’s napkins. He tried nevertheless to sleep; but then his hat got in his way. It was one of those shallow, white straw hats with a black ribbon round it, of the kind commonly known as “sailor.” When Fleurissoire left it in its usual position, its stiff brim prevented him from leaning his head back against the partition of the carriage; if, in order to do this, he raised his hat a little, the partition bumped it forwards; when, on the contrary, he pressed his hat down behind, the brim was caught between the partition and the back of his neck, and the sailor rose up over his forehead like the lid of a valve. He decided at last to take it right off and to cover his head with his comforter, which he arranged to fall over his eyes so as to keep out the light. At any rate, he had taken precautions against the night; at Toulon that morning he had bought a box of insecticide and, even if he had to pay dear for it, he thought to himself that he would not hesitate to spend the night in one of the best hotels; for if he had no sleep that night, in what state of bodily wretchedness would he not be when he arrived at Rome?--at the mercy of the meanest freemason!