He waved her back, however. 'No, no, leave me, I have never brought you anything but sorrow. When I think that you used to deprive yourself of dresses, and that I was sent to college! Ah! a precious lot of good my education has done me! And then I almost dishonoured our name, and Heaven alone knows where I should be at the present time if you hadn't bled yourself in every vein to repair my folly!'
She was again smiling in her peaceful way: 'You certainly haven't woke up in a good humour, my dear fellow,' she replied. 'You know very well that all that is blotted out, forgotten. Aren't you now doing your duty as a Frenchman? I'm quite proud of you since you've enlisted; I assure you I am.'
She had turned towards Jean as though to summon him to her assistance. He was gazing at her, somewhat surprised to find that she did not look so pretty as he had thought her in the morning. She seemed slighter and paler now that he no longer saw her with the hallucinatory vision of his weariness. Her likeness to her brother remained very striking, however, although, at this moment, the difference in their natures was made plainly manifest; he, nervous like a woman, stricken with the disease of the period, a prey to the historical, social crisis of the race, capable of rising at one moment to the noblest enthusiasm, and of falling, the next, to the most abject despair; she, so small and slight, as unobtrusive as a Cinderella, with the air of a resigned little housewife, but albeit displaying an undaunted brow and brave eyes—in a word, the stuff that martyrs are made of.
'Proud of me!' Maurice exclaimed. 'Well, there's no reason why you should be proud of me. For a month past we have been flying the enemy like the cowards we are.'
'Well,' said Jean, in his sensible way; 'we are not the only ones—we simply do as we are bidden.'
But now the crisis to which the young fellow was a prey burst forth with more violence than ever. 'That's just it, and I've had my fill of it. Isn't it enough to make one shed tears of blood—these continual defeats, these idiotic generals, these soldiers who are stupidly led to the slaughter-house like flocks of animals? And now, here we are in a blind alley whence there's no escape! You can see that the Prussians are coming up on all sides, and that we are about to be crushed—the army is lost! No, no; I shall stay here; I would rather be shot as a deserter. You can go away without me, Jean. No! I won't go back to the regiment; I shall stay here!'
A fresh flood of tears stretched him on his pillow. This was one of those irresistible slackenings of the nerves sweeping everything away, one of those sudden collapses into despair bringing with it contempt for everybody, himself included, to which he was so subject. His sister, who knew him well, remained undisturbed. 'It would be very wrong, my dear Maurice,' said she, 'to desert your post at the moment of danger.'
With a sudden start he sat up in bed: 'Well, give me my gun, then. I'll blow my brains out. Like that it will be sooner over.' Then, stretching out his arm and pointing to Weiss, who sat there motionless and silent, he added: 'There, he's the only sensible one; yes, he alone saw clearly into all this—don't you remember, Jean, what he said to me a month ago at Mulhausen?'
'That's true,' the corporal replied; 'this gentleman said we should be beaten.'