That was read to us the next time the regimental orders came out.
You see, the machine worked admirably. Its mechanism runs with wonderful accuracy. Any one who took an interest in the matter could work the whole thing out in advance. Dubois did this. He knew well enough what was waiting for him—from day to day he became quieter, from day to day sadder, so that at length he hardly spoke at all to his comrades. He could do nothing to protect himself; he hadn't even enough energy left for flight. Good Lord, he had long lost that little bit of energy he had, lost it—somewhere down south in the sunburnt wastes, where the penal battalion works and suffers.
The machinery ground on…. Eighty days' imprisonment was Little Jean's next dose. After that he got sixty days' cellule—just for a change. If you consider only the number of days, you might think he had got off pretty cheaply this time. Not a bit of it. These sixty days were days of starvation. For cellule means hunger and emaciation—awful hunger and awful emaciation.
After his sixty days of diet cure Dubois came back to the company for just a week, if I remember rightly. Then the machine began to work again. This time it was a month he got…. Thirty days' imprisonment—for this incorrigible and insubordinate subject! No, one really cannot be surprised that the colonel lost all patience. So he refused to confirm the punishment and sent the black sheep of the company to trial by court-martial. And once more the machine began to do its work.
Two years' imprisonment, two years' penal servitude in a fortress, for Jean le malheureux!
With the next batch of convicts they carried him off to Oran. I have heard nothing of him since—I do not know how he fared as a convict. In my unconquerable optimism I am ready to assume that this two years' interregnum did not do particular harm to Little Jean's health and that he returned home, having done his duty by the Foreign Legion, dapper and cheerful as he used to be. Even this supposition gives us a very pretty bit of arithmetic.
| Jean Dubois' original period of service | 5 years | |
| Extra service for time spent in the penal battalion | 6 months | |
| Ditto for regimental punishments | 7 months | |
| Ditto for imprisonment in fortress | 2 years | |
| Total time Jean Dubois had to serve in place of his original five years | 8 years | 1 month |
In this optimistic piece of arithmetic my optimism even goes so far as to assume that Jean the Unlucky, during his two years of imprisonment and during the rest of his period of service, did not incur any additional penalties.
If I, however, compel myself to consider his career from a pessimistic point of view, the sum works out much more prettily. Dubois had not a very strong constitution and it is quite possible that the penal battalion, plus imprisonment, plus starvation, plus despair, quite finished him off. In that case the loss of a blue scarf, a spiteful sergeant and the crass stupidity of a series of officers have been the death of him.
But if Jean Dubois really got over his years of prison—when he returns home (he is a Frenchman!) his strength will not be worth much in the workaday world.