The veterans of ’70 were passing through the streets, with the green and black ribbon in their lapel, souvenirs of the privations of the Siege of Paris, and of heroic and disastrous campaigns.  The sight of these men, satisfied with their past, made him turn pale.  Nobody was recalling his, but he knew it, and that was enough.  In vain his reason would try to lull this interior tempest. . . .  Those times were different; then there was none of the present unanimity; the Empire was unpopular . . . everything was lost. . . .  But the recollection of a celebrated sentence was fixing itself in his mind as an obsession—­“France still remained!” Many had thought as he did in his youth, but they had not, therefore, evaded military service.  They had stood by their country in a last and desperate resistance.

Useless was his excuse-making reasoning.  Nobler thoughts showed him the fallacy of this beating around the bush.  Explanations and demonstrations are unnecessary to the understanding of patriotic and religious ideals; true patriotism does not need them.  One’s country . . . is one’s country.  And the laboring man, skeptical and jesting, the self-centred farmer, the solitary pastor, all had sprung to action at the sound of this conjuring word, comprehending it instantly, without previous instruction.

“It is necessary to pay,” Don Marcelo kept repeating mentally.  “I ought to pay my debt.”

As in his dreams, he was constantly feeling the anguish of an upright and desperate man who wishes to meet his obligations.

Pay! . . . and how?  It was now very late.  For a moment the heroic resolution came into his head of offering himself as a volunteer, of marching with his bag at his side in some one of the groups of future combatants, the same as the carpenter.  But the uselessness of the sacrifice came immediately into his mind.  Of what use would it be? . . .  He looked robust and was well-preserved for his age, but he was over seventy, and only the young make good soldiers.  Combat is but one incident in the struggle.  Equally necessary are the hardship and self-denial in the form of interminable marches, extremes of temperature, nights in the open air, shoveling earth, digging trenches, loading carts, suffering hunger. . . .  No; it was too late.  He could not even leave an illustrious name that might serve as an example.

Instinctively he glanced behind.  He was not alone in the world; he had a son who could assume his father’s debt . . . but that hope only lasted a minute.  His son was not French; he belonged to another people; half of his blood was from another source.  Besides, how could the boy be expected to feel as he did?  Would he even understand if his father should explain it to him? . . .  It was useless to expect anything from this lady-killing, dancing clown, from this fellow of senseless bravado, who was constantly exposing his life in duels in order to satisfy a silly sense of honor.