Having established in these terms the injustice of fate, the Captain reached the threshold of his dear café, but he saw there such a mob of blue blouses, he heard such a din of laughter and click of billiard-balls, that he returned home in very bad humor.
His room—it was, perhaps, the first time that he had spent in it several hours of the day—looked rather shabby. His bed-curtains were the color of an old pipe. The fireplace was heaped with old cigar-stumps, and one could have written his name in the dust on the furniture. He contemplated for some time the walls where the sublime lancer of Leipsic rode a hundred times to a glorious death. Then, for an occupation, he passed his wardrobe in review. It was a lamentable series of bottomless pockets, socks full of holes, and shirts without buttons.
“I must have a servant,” he said.
Then he thought of the little lame girl.
“That’s what I’ll do. I’ll hire the next little room; winter is coming, and the little thing will freeze under the stairs. She will look after my clothes and my linen and keep the barracks clean. A valet, how’s that?”
But a cloud darkened the comfortable picture. The Captain remembered that quarter-day was still a long way off, and that his account at the Cafe Prosper was assuming alarming proportions.
“Not rich enough,” he said to himself. “And in the mean time they are robbing me down there. That is positive. The board is too high, and that wretch of a veterinary plays bezique much too well. I have paid his way now for eight days. Who knows? Perhaps I had better put the little one in charge of the mess, soup au café in the morning, stew at noon, and ragout every evening—campaign life, in fact. I know all about that. Quite the thing to try.”
Going out he saw at once the mistress of the house, a great brutal peasant, and the little lame girl, who both, with pitchforks in their hands, were turning over the dung-heap in the yard.
“Does she know how to sew, to wash, to make soup?” he asked, brusquely.
“Who—Pierette? Why?”