I didn’t know exactly what piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure of, that I was alive.  If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold on to it....  There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it meant, I didn’t care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a bright flower....  I can’t tell you how lovely it seemed.  I simply drank it in....  I remembered when I was a child, one night near La Samaritaine.  There were fireworks on the river.  That child seemed to be someone else, who made me laugh, and yet I was sorry for him; and then I thought that it was a good thing to be alive, and grow up, and have something, somebody, no matter who to love ... even that rocket; and then the pain came on, and I began to howl, and didn’t know any more till I found myself in the ambulance.  There wasn’t much fun in living then; it felt as if a dog was gnawing my bones ... might as well have stayed at the bottom of the hole ... but even then how fine it seemed to live the way I used to, just live on every day without pain ... think of that! and we never notice it,—­without any pain at all ... none!... it seemed like a dream, and when it did let up for a second, just to taste the air on your tongue, and feel light all over your body—­God Almighty! to think that it was like that all the time before, and I thought nothing of it....  What fools we are to wait till we lose a thing before we understand it!  And when we do want it, and ask pardon because we did not appreciate it before, all we hear is:  ‘Too late!’”

“It is never too late,” said Clerambault.

Gillot was only too ready to believe this; as an educated workman he was better armed for the fray than Moreau or Clerambault himself.  Nothing depressed him for long; “fall down, pick yourself up again, and try once more,” he would say, and he always believed he could surmount any obstacle that barred his way.  He was ready to march against them on his one leg, the quicker the better.  Like the others, he was devoted to the idea of revolution and found means to reconcile it with his optimism; everything was to pass off quietly according to him, for he was a man without rancour.

It would not have been safe, however, to trust him too much in this respect; there are many surprises in these plebeian characters, for they are very easily moved and apt to change.  Clerambault heard him one day talking with a friend named Lagneau on leave from the front; they said the poilus meant to knock everything to pieces when the war was over, maybe before.  A man of the lower classes in France is often charming, quick to seize on your idea before you have had a chance to explain it thoroughly; but good Lord! how soon he forgets.  He forgets what was said, what he answered, what he saw, what he believed, what he wanted; but he is always sure of what he says, and sees, and thinks now.  When Gillot was talking