Martin strove to comfort him with specious words of hope. But Bigourdin’s mental condition was that of a man to whom wallowing in despair alone brings consolation. He had been suffering from a gathering avalanche of misfortunes. First had come his rejection, followed by the unsatisfied longing of the devout lover. It cannot be denied, however, that he had borne himself gallantly. Then the fading of his dream of the Viriot alliance had filled him with dismay. Félise’s adventure in the Rue Maugrabine and its resulting situation had caused him sleepless nights. Lucilla Merriton had taken him up between her fingers and twiddled him round, thereby depriving him of volition, and having put him down in a state of bewilderment, had carried off Félise. And to-day, last accretion that set the avalanche rolling, his old friend Viriot had called him a breaker of honourable understandings and had sent a clerk with his bill. The avalanche swept him into the Slough of Despond, wherein he lay solacing himself with hopeless imaginings and the old brandy of the Brigadier. But human instinct made him beckon to Martin, call him “_tu_” and bid him to keep an eye on the quagmire and stretch out a helping hand. He also had in view a subtle and daring scheme. “_Mon brave ami_,” said he, “when I die”—his broad face assumed an expression of infinite woe and he spoke as though he were seventy—“what will become of the Hôtel des Grottes? Félise will benefit principally, _bien entendu_, by my will; but she will marry one of these days and will follow her husband, who probably will not want to concern himself with hotel keeping.” He glanced shrewdly at Martin, who regarded him with unmoved placidity. “To think that the hotel will be sold and all its honourable traditions changed would break my heart. I should not like to die without any solution of continuity.” “But, my dear Bigourdin,” said Martin, “what are you thinking of? You’re a young man. You’re not stricken with a fatal malady. You’re not going to die. You have twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years before you in the course of which all kinds of things may happen.” Bigourdin leant forward and stretched out his great arm across the fireplace until his fingers touched Martin’s knee. “Do you know what is going to happen? War is going to happen. Next year—the year after—five years hence—_que sais-je, moi?_—but it has to come. All these pacifists and anti-militarists are either imbeciles or traitors—those that are not dreaming mad-house dreams of the millennium are filling their pockets—of the latter there are some in high places. There is going to be war, I tell you, and many people are going to die. And when the bugle sounds I put on my old uniform and march to the cannon’s mouth like my fathers before me. And why shouldn’t I die, like my brother in Morocco? Tell me that?”