“Well, if the wretched thing is a nuisance, we shall have to get rid of it.”

After this consent, we shall no doubt make up our minds to do so.

Meanwhile Lerondeau is creeping steadily towards healing.

Lying on his back, bound up in bandages and a zinc trough, and imprisoned by cushions, he nevertheless looks like a ship which the tide will set afloat at dawn.

He is putting on flesh, yet, strange to say, he seems to get lighter and lighter.  He is learning not to groan, not because his frail soul is gaining strength, but because the animal is better fed and more robust.

His ideas of strength of mind are indeed very elementary.  As soon as I hear his first cry, in the warm room where his wound is dressed, I give him an encouraging look, and say: 

“Be brave, Marie!  Try to be strong!”

Then he knits his brows, makes a grimace, and asks: 

“Ought I to say ’By God!’?”

The zinc trough in which Marie’s shattered leg has been lying has lost its shape; it has become oxydised and is split at the edges; so I have decided to change it.

I take it away, look at it, and throw it into a corner.  Marie follows my movements with a scared glance.  While I am adjusting the new trough, a solid, comfortable one, but rather different in appearance, he casts an eloquent glance at the discarded one, and his eyes fill with copious tears.

This change is a small matter; but in the lives of the sick, there are no small things.

Lerondeau will weep for the old zinc fragment for two days, and it will be a long time before he ceases to look distrustfully at the new trough, and to criticise it in those minute and bitter terms which only a connoisseur can understand or invent.

Carre, on the other hand, cannot succeed in carrying along his body by the generous impulse of his soul.  Everything about him save his eyes and his liquid voice foreshadow the corpse.  Throughout the winter days and the long sleepless nights, he looks as if he were dragging along a derelict.

He strains at it ... with his poignant songs and his brave words which falter now, and often die away in a moan.

I had to do his dressing in the presence of Marie.  The amount of work to be got through, and the cramped quarters made this necessary.  Marie was grave and attentive as if he were taking a lesson, and, indeed, it was a lesson in patience and courage.  But all at once, the teacher broke down.  In the middle of the dressing, Carre opened his lips, and in spite of himself, began to complain without restraint or measure, giving up the struggle in despair.

Lerondeau listened, anxious and uneasy; and Carre, knowing that Marie was listening, continued to lament, like one who has lost all sense of shame.

Lerondeau called me by a motion of his eyelids.  He said: 

“Carre!...”

And he added: