Her smile came back to her face, together with her serenity.

“Is that all?  Your sleep don’t seem to have done you good, my poor friend.  But since that is all gone and past, forget it!  Are you not doing your duty now, like a good Frenchman?  I am very proud of you, I assure you, now that you are a soldier.”

She had turned toward Jean, as if to ask him to come to her assistance, and he looked at her with some surprise that she appeared to him less beautiful than yesterday; she was paler, thinner, now that the glamour was no longer in his drowsy eyes.  The one striking point that remained unchanged was her resemblance to her brother, and yet the difference in their two natures was never more strongly marked than at that moment; he, weak and nervous as a woman, swayed by the impulse of the hour, displaying in his person all the fitful and emotional temperament of his nation, vibrating from one moment to another between the loftiest enthusiasm and the most abject despair; she, the patient, indomitable housewife, such an inconsiderable little creature in her resignation and self-effacement, meeting adversity with a brave face and eyes full of inexpugnable courage and resolution, fashioned from the stuff of which heroes are made.

“Proud of me!” cried Maurice.  “Ah! truly, you have great reason to be.  For a month and more now we have been flying, like the cowards that we are!”

“What of it? we are not the only ones,” said Jean with his practical common sense; “we do what we are told to do.”

But the young man broke out more furiously than ever:  “I have had enough of it, I tell you!  Our imbecile leaders, our continual defeats, our brave soldiers led like sheep to the slaughter—­is it not enough, seeing all these things, to make one weep tears of blood?  We are here now in Sedan, caught in a trap from which there is no escape; you can see the Prussians closing in on us from every quarter, and certain destruction is staring us in the face; there is no hope, the end is come.  No!  I shall remain where I am; I may as well be shot as a deserter.  Jean, do you go, and leave me here.  No!  I won’t go back there; I will stay here.”

He sank upon the pillow in a renewed outpour of tears.  It was an utter breakdown of the nervous system, sweeping everything before it, one of those sudden lapses into hopelessness to which he was so subject, in which he despised himself and all the world.  His sister, knowing as she did the best way of treating such crises, kept an unruffled face.

“That would not be a nice thing to do, dear Maurice—­desert your post in the hour of danger.”

He rose impetuously to a sitting posture:  “Then give me my musket!  I will go and blow my brains out; that will be the shortest way of ending it.”  Then, pointing with outstretched arm to Weiss, where he sat silent and motionless, he said:  “There! that is the only sensible man I have seen; yes, he is the only one who saw things as they were.  You remember what he said to me, Jean, at Mulhausen, a month ago?”