Don Marcelo looked from one to another.  The fatigues of war, especially the forced march of the last days, were very apparent in their persons.  Some were tall and slender with an angular slimness; others were stocky and corpulent with short neck and head sunk between the shoulders.  These had lost much of their fat in a month’s campaign, the wrinkled and flabby skin hanging in folds in various parts of their bodies.  All had shaved heads, the same as the soldiers.  Around the table shone two rows of cranial spheres, reddish or dark.  Their ears stood out grotesquely, and their jaw bones were in strong relief owing to their thinness.  Some had preserved the upright moustache in the style of the Emperor; the most of them were shaved or had a stubby tuft like a brush.

A golden bracelet glistened on the wrist of the Count, stretched on the table.  He was the oldest of them all and the only one that kept his hair, of a frosty red, carefully combed and glistening with pomade.  Although about fifty years old, he still maintained a youthful vigor cultivated by exercise.  Wrinkled, bony and strong, he tried to dissimulate his uncouthness as a man of battle under a suave and indolent laziness.  The officers treated him with the greatest respect.  Hartrott told his uncle that the Count was a great artist, musician and poet.  The Emperor was his friend; they had known each other from boyhood.  Before the war, certain scandals concerning his private life had exiled him from Court—­mere lampoons of the socialists and scandal-mongers.  The Kaiser had always kept a secret affection for his former chum.  Everybody remembered his dance, “The Caprices of Scheherazade,” represented with the greatest luxury in Berlin through the endorsement of his powerful friend, William II.  The Count had lived many years in the Orient.  In fact, he was a great gentleman and an artist of exquisite sensibility as well as a soldier.

Since Desnoyers was now his guest, the Count could not permit him to remain silent, so he made an opportunity of bringing him into the conversation.

“Did you see any of the insurrections? . . .  Did the troops have to kill many people?  How about the assassination of Poincare? . . .”

He asked these questions in quick succession and Don Marcelo, bewildered by their absurdity, did not know how to reply.  He believed that he must have fallen in with a feast of fools.  Then he suspected that they were making fun of him.  Uprisings?  Assassinations of the President? . . .

Some gazed at him with pity because of his ignorance, others with suspicion, believing that he was merely pretending not to know of these events which had happened so near him.

His nephew insisted.  “The daily papers in Germany have been full of accounts of these matters.  Fifteen days ago, the people of Paris revolted against the Government, bombarding the Palais de l’Elysee, and assassinating the President.  The army had to resort to the machine guns before order could be restored. . . .  Everybody knows that.”