Surely I knew that eye, that voice, that face.  But when and where had I seen them?  I had certainly met that man, spoken to him, shaken his hand.  That was a long, long time ago.  It was lost in the haze wherein the mind seems to feel around blindly for memories and pursues them like fleeing phantoms without being able to seize them.  He, too, was observing me, staring me out of countenance, with the persistence of a man who remembers slightly but not completely.  Our eyes, embarrassed by this persistent contact, turned away; then, after a few minutes, drawn together again by the obscure and tenacious will of working memory, they met once more, and I said:  “Monsieur, instead of staring at each other for an hour or so, would it not be better to try to discover where we have known each other?”

My neighbor answered graciously:  “You are quite right, monsieur.”

I named myself:  “I am Henri Bonclair, a magistrate.”

He hesitated for a few minutes; then, with the vague look and voice which accompany great mental tension, he said:  “Oh, I remember perfectly.  I met you twelve years ago, before the war, at the Poincels!”

“Yes, monsieur.  Ah!  Ah!  You are Lieutenant Revaliere?”

“Yes.  I was Captain Revaliere even up to the time when I lost my feet —­both of them together from one cannon ball.”

Now that we knew each other’s identity we looked at each other again.  I remembered perfectly the handsome, slender youth who led the cotillons with such frenzied agility and gracefulness that he had been nicknamed “the fury.”  Going back into the dim, distant past, I recalled a story which I had heard and forgotten, one of those stories to which one listens but forgets, and which leave but a faint impression upon the memory.

There was something about love in it.  Little by little the shadows cleared up, and the face of a young girl appeared before my eyes.  Then her name struck me with the force of an explosion:  Mademoiselle de Mandel.  I remembered everything now.  It was indeed a love story, but quite commonplace.  The young girl loved this young man, and when I had met them there was already talk of the approaching wedding.  The youth seemed to be very much in love, very happy.

I raised my eye to the net, where all the packages which had been brought in by the servant were trembling from the motion of the train, and the voice of the servant came back to me, as if he had just finished speaking.  He had said:  “There, monsieur, that is all.  There are five of them:  the candy, the doll, the drum, the gun, and the pate de foies gras.”

Then, in a second, a whole romance unfolded itself in my head.  It was like all those which I had already read, where the young lady married notwithstanding the catastrophe, whether physical or financial; therefore, this officer who had been maimed in the war had returned, after the campaign, to the young girl who had given him her promise, and she had kept her word.