He felt all the joys of a good housekeeper in surveying the treasures piled up in the kitchen—­great tins of canned meat, pyramids of butter crocks, and bags of dried vegetables.  He had accumulated enough there to maintain a large family.  The war had now offered a new pretext for him to visit Don Marcelo’s wine-vaults.

“Let them come!” he would say with a heroic gesture as he took stock of his treasure trove.  “Let them come when they will!  We are ready for them!”

The care and increase of his provisions, and the investigation of news were the two functions of his existence.  It seemed necessary to procure ten, twelve, fifteen papers a day; some because they were reactionary, and the novelty of seeing all the French united filled him with enthusiasm; others because they were radical and must be better informed of the news received from the government.  They generally appeared at midday, at three, at four and at five in the afternoon.  An half hour’s delay in the publication of the sheet raised great hopes in the public, on the qui vive for stupendous news.  All the last supplements were snatched up; everybody had his pockets stuffed with papers, waiting anxiously the issue of extras in order to buy them, too.  Yet all the sheets were saying approximately the same thing.

Argensola was developing a credulous, enthusiastic soul, capable of admitting many improbable things.  He presumed that this same spirit was probably animating everybody around him.  At times, his old critical attitude would threaten to rebel, but doubt was repulsed as something dishonorable.  He was living in a new world, and it was but natural that extraordinary things should occur that could be neither measured nor explained by the old processes of reasoning.  So he commented with infantile joy on the marvellous accounts in the daily papers—­of combats between a single Belgian platoon and entire regiments of enemies, putting them to disorderly flight; of the German fear of the bayonet that made them run like hares the instant that the charge sounded; of the inefficiency of the German artillery whose projectiles always missed fire.

It was logical and natural that little Belgium should conquer gigantic Germany—­a repetition of David and Goliath—­with all the metaphors and images that this unequal contest had inspired across so many centuries.  Like the greater part of the nation, he had the mentality of a reader of tales of chivalry who feels himself defrauded if the hero, single-handed, fails to cleave a thousand enemies with one fell stroke.  He purposely chose the most sensational papers, those which published many stories of single encounters, of individual deeds about which nobody could know with any degree of certainty.

The intervention of England on the seas made him imagine a frightful famine, coming providentially like a thunder-clap to torture the enemy.  He honestly believed that ten days of this maritime blockade would convert Germany into a group of shipwrecked sailors floating on a raft.  This vision made him repeat his visits to the kitchen to gloat over his packages of provisions.