Jean was concerned at the sight of the green logs which were still smoking, and called to the two men—Loubet and Lapoulle, both belonging to his squad—who were desperately endeavouring to kindle the fire: 'Just let that be. You're poisoning us with that smoke.'
Loubet, who was lithe and active, with the look of a wag, sneeringly replied, 'It's catching alight, corporal; I assure you it is.' And giving his comrade Lapoulle a push, he added, 'Here, you, why don't you blow?'
In point of fact, Lapoulle, a perfect colossus, was exhausting himself in his efforts to raise a tempest, with his cheeks puffed out like goat-skins full of liquor, his whole face suffused by a rush of blood, and his eyes red and full of tears. Two other men of the squad, Chouteau and Pache—the former of whom lay on his back like a lazybones fond of his ease, whilst the other had assumed a crouching posture that he might carefully repair a rent in his trousers—were greatly amused by the fearful grimace which that brute Lapoulle was making, and burst at last into a roar of laughter.
Jean let them laugh. There would, perhaps, not be many more opportunities for gaiety; and despite the serious expression which sat on his full, round, regular-featured face, he was by no means a partisan of melancholy. Indeed, he closed his eyes readily enough whenever his men wished to amuse themselves. However, another group now attracted his attention. For nearly an hour one of the privates of his squad, Maurice Levasseur, had been chatting with a civilian, a red-haired individual, looking some six-and-thirty years of age, with a good-dog-Tray sort of face, and large blue goggle eyes—short-sighted eyes, which had led to his being exempted from military service. A quartermaster of the reserve artillery, who with his dark moustache and imperial had a bold confident air, had joined the couple; and the three of them tarried there, making themselves at home.
To spare them a reprimand, Jean, in his obliging way, thought it his duty to intervene. 'You would do well to leave, sir,' he said to the civilian. 'Here comes the tattoo, and if the lieutenant saw you——'
Maurice did not let him finish. 'Don't go, Weiss,' said he; and, addressing the corporal, he dryly added, 'This gentleman is my brother-in-law. The colonel knows him, and has given him permission to remain in camp.'
Why did this peasant, Jean Macquart, whose hands still smelt of the dungheap, interfere in a matter that did not concern him? thought Maurice. He, who had been called to the bar during the previous autumn, and who, on joining the army as a volunteer, had been forthwith enrolled in the 106th of the Line, thanks to the colonel's protection, and without having to undergo the usual probation at the depôt—carried his knapsack willingly enough; but, at the very outset, a feeling of repugnance, of covert revolt, had turned him against this illiterate corporal, the clodhopper who commanded him.
'All right,' retorted Jean, in his quiet way. 'Get yourselves caught. I don't care a rap.'
Then he abruptly faced about on finding that Maurice had not told him a fib; for at that very moment the colonel, M. de Vineuil, whose long yellow face was intersected by bushy white moustaches, passed by with that grand aristocratic air of his, and acknowledged the salute of Weiss and Maurice with a smile. The colonel was walking rapidly towards a farmhouse which peeped out from among some plum trees on the right hand, a few hundred paces away. The staff was installed there for the night, but no one knew whether the commander of the Army Corps—struck down by the grievous tidings that his brother had been killed at Weissenburg[3]—was there or not. Major-General Bourgain-Desfeuilles, to whose brigade the 106th Regiment belonged, was, however, assuredly at the farm, brawling no doubt according to his wont, with his huge belly swaying to and fro atop of his diminutive legs, and with his face highly coloured, like the face of one fond of the table, who is not troubled with any excess of brains. There was an increasing stir around the farmhouse; every minute or so estafettes were galloping off and returning; and feverish, indeed, were the long hours of waiting for the belated telegrams that were expected to bring news of the great battle, which since daybreak everyone had deemed inevitable and proximate. Where had it been fought, and how had it resulted? By degrees, as the night fell, it seemed as though the spirit of anxiety were brooding over the orchards, over the scattered stacks, and around the cow-sheds, spreading itself out on all sides like a shadowy sea. The men told one another that a Prussian spy had been caught prowling about the camp, and had been conducted to the farm to be questioned by the general. If Colonel de Vineuil ran there so fast it was, perhaps, because he had received a telegram.
Meanwhile, Maurice Levasseur had begun to chat again with his brother-in-law Weiss, and his cousin Honoré Fouchard, the quartermaster. The tattoo party, coming from afar off with its numbers gradually strengthened, passed near them, drumming and trumpeting in the melancholy twilight peacefulness; and yet they did not seem to hear it even. Grandson of a hero of the First Napoleon's armies, Maurice was born at Le Chêne Populeux, in the Argonne. His father, being turned away from the paths of glory, had sunk down to a meagre tax-collectorship; and his mother, a peasant woman, had expired in bringing him and his twin sister, Henriette, into the world. If Maurice had enlisted in the army, it was because of grave offences, the outcome of a course of dissipation in which his weak, excitable nature had embarked at the time when he had repaired to Paris to read for the bar, and when his relatives had pinched and stinted themselves to make a gentleman of him. But he had squandered their money in gaming, on women, and on the thousand and one follies of the all-devouring city, and his conduct had hastened his father's death. His sister, after parting with her all to pay his debts, had been lucky enough to secure a husband, that honest fellow Weiss, an Alsatian of Mulhausen, who had long been an accountant at the refinery of Le Chêne Populeux, and was now an overseer in the employ of M. Delaherche, owner of one of the principal cloth-weaving establishments of Sedan. Maurice, who with his nervous nature was seized as promptly with hope as with despair, who was both generous and enthusiastic, but utterly devoid of stability—the slave indeed of each shifting, passing breeze—imagined that he was now quite cured of his follies. Fair and short, with an unusually large forehead, a small nose and chin, and generally refined features, he had grey, caressing eyes, in which there gleamed at times a spark of madness.