The manager is now another young nephew of the Messrs. Gozlan.  He was living in Paris and came back on the day of the general mobilization.  Old Monsieur Gozlan looks after everything.

I have a month to wait.  I wait slowly, as everybody does.  The houses in the lower town are peopled by absentees.  When you go in they talk to you about the last letter, and always make the same huge and barren reflections on the war.  In my street there are twelve houses where the people no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like Madame Marcassin.  In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhaps come back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans only on emptiness and silence.  There are women who have begun their lives again in a kind of happy misery.  The places near them of the dead or the living they have filled up.

The main streets have not changed, any more than the squares, except the one which is encrusted with a collection of huts.  The life in them is as bustling as ever, and of brighter color, and more amusing.  Many young men, rich or influential, are passing their wartime in the offices of the depot, of the Exchange, of Food Control, of Enlistment, of the Pay Department, and other administrations whose names one cannot remember.  The priests are swarming in the two hospitals; on the faces of orderlies, cyclist messengers, doorkeepers and porters you can read their origin.  For myself, I have never seen a parson in the front lines wearing the uniform of the ordinary fighting soldier, the uniform of those who make up the fatigue parties and fight as well against perfect misery!

My thought turns to what the man once said to me who was by me among the straw of a stable, “Why is there no more justice?” By the little that I know and have seen and am seeing, I can tell what an enormous rush sprang up, at the same time as the war, against the equality of the living.  And if that injustice, which was turning the heroism of the others into a cheat has not been openly extended, it is because the war has lasted too long, and the scandal became so glaring that they were forced to look into it.  It seems that it is only through fear that they have ended by deciding so much.

* * * * * *

I go into Fontan’s.  Crillon is with me—­I picked him up from the little glass cupboard of his shop as I came out.  He is finding it harder and harder to keep going; he has aged a lot, and his frame, so powerfully bolted together, cracks with rheumatism.

We sit down.  Crillon groans and bends so low in his hand-to-hand struggle with the pains which beset him that I think his forehead is going to strike the marble-topped table.

He tells me in detail of his little business, which is going badly, and how he has confused glimpses of the bare and empty future which awaits him—­when a sergeant with a fair mustache and eyeglasses makes his entry.  This personage, whose collar shows white thunderbolts,[1] instead of a number, comes and sits near us.  He orders a port wine and Victorine serves it with a smile.  She smiles at random, and indistinctly, at all the men, like Nature.