And now the poor slave of the lamp seems to take a resolution.  He stops and devotionally rolling his Don Quixote eyes in his gloomy, emaciated face, he says, “I’m always thinking about something.  What? you’ll say.  Well, here it is.  I belong to the League of Patriots.”

As they brighten still more, his eyes are like two live embers in the darkness, “Deroulede!” he cries; “that’s the man—­he’s my God!”

Petrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements in the night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his long elastic arms give him some resemblance.  “He’s for war; he’s for Alsace-Lorraine, that’s what he’s for; and above all, he’s for nothing else.  Ah, that’s all there is to it!  The Boches have got to disappear off the earth, else it’ll be us.  Ah, when they talk politics to me, I ask ’em, ‘Are you for Deroulede, yes or no?’ That’s enough!  I got my schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it’s grand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I’m adjutant[1]—­almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!”

[Footnote 1:  A non-com., approximately equivalent to regimental sergeant-major.—­Tr.]

He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across the open, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Deroulede had spoken to him.  “He spoke to everybody, an’ then he spoke to me, as close to me as you and me; but it was him!  I wanted an idea, and he gave it to me!”

“Very good,” I say to him; “very good.  You are a patriot, that’s excellent.”

I feel that the greatness of this creed surpasses the selfish demands of labor—­although I have never had the time to think much about these things—­and it strikes me as touching and noble.

A last fiery spasm gets hold of Petrolus as he espies afar Eudo’s pointed house, and he cries that on the great day of revenge there will be some accounts to settle; and then the fervor of this ideal-bearer cools and fades, and is spent along the length of the roads.  He is now no more than a poor black bantam which cannot possibly take wing.  His face mournfully awakes to the evening.  He shuffles along, bows his long and feeble spine, and his spirit and his strength exhausted, he approaches the porch of his house, where Madame Marcassin awaits him.

CHAPTER VII

A SUMMARY

The workmen manifest mistrust and even dislike towards me.  Why?  I don’t know; but my good intentions have gradually got weary.

One after another, sundry women have occupied my life.  Antonia Veron was first.  Her marriage and mine, their hindrance and restriction, threw us back upon each other as of yore.  We found ourselves alone one day in my house—­where nothing ever used to happen, and she offered me her lips, irresistibly.  The appeal of her sensuality was answered by mine, then, and often later.  But the pleasure constantly restored, which impelled me towards her, always ended in dismal enlightenments.  She remained a capricious and baffling egotist, and when I came away from her house across the dark suburb among a host of beings vanishing, like myself, I only brought away the memory of her nervous and irritating laugh, and that new wrinkle which clung to her mouth like an implement.