Meanwhile, with blind irrelevance, she persisted in talking about Laurier, commenting upon his achievements.

“I do not love him, I never have loved him.  Do not look so cross!  How could the poor man ever be compared with you?  You must admit, though, that his new existence is rather interesting.  I rejoice in his brave deeds as though an old friend had done them, a family visitor whom I had not seen for a long time. . . .  The poor man deserved a better fate.  He ought to have married some other woman, some companion more on a level with his ideals. . . .  I tell you that I really pity him!”

And this pity was so intense that her eyes filled with tears, awakening the tortures of jealousy in her lover.  After these interviews, Desnoyers was more ill-tempered and despondent than ever.

“I am beginning to realize that we are in a false position,” he said one morning to Argensola.  “Life is going to become increasingly painful.  It is difficult to remain tranquil, continuing the same old existence in the midst of a people at war.”

His companion had about come to the same conclusion.  He, too, was beginning to feel that the life of a young foreigner in Paris was insufferable, now that it was so upset by war.

“One has to keep showing passports all the time in order that the police may be sure that they have not discovered a deserter.  In the street car, the other afternoon, I had to explain that I was a Spaniard to some girls who were wondering why I was not at the front. . . .  One of them, as soon as she learned my nationality, asked me with great simplicity why I did not offer myself as a volunteer. . . .  Now they have invented a word for the stay-at-homes, calling them Les Embusques, the hidden ones. . . .  I am sick and tired of the ironical looks shot at me wherever I go; it makes me wild to be taken for an Embusque.”

A flash of heroism was galvanizing the impressionable Bohemian.  Now that everybody was going to the war, he was wishing to do the same thing.  He was not afraid of death; the only thing that was disturbing him was the military service, the uniform, the mechanical obedience to bugle-call, the blind subservience to the chiefs.  Fighting was not offering any difficulties for him but his nature capriciously resented everything in the form of discipline.  The foreign groups in Paris were trying to organize each its own legion of volunteers and he, too, was planning his—­a battalion of Spaniards and South Americans, reserving naturally the presidency of the organizing committee for himself, and later the command of the body.