All the poplars rustle softly. With one voice, the voice of Summer itself, they say: "No! No! He is not right!"
A little beetle crosses the path before me. I step on it unintentionally, but it flies away in desperate haste. It too has answered in its own way: "No, really, your friend is not right."
"Tell him he is wrong," sing the swarm of insects that buzz about the lime-tree.
And even a loud roar from the guns that travels across the landscape seems to say gruffly: "He is wrong! He is wrong!"
During the evening the chief came back to see Leglise, who said to him with the same mournful gravity:
"No, I won't, Monsieur, I would rather die."
We go down into the garden, and the chief says a strange thing to me:
"Try to convince him. I begin at last to feel ashamed of demanding such a sacrifice from him."
And I too... am I not ashamed?
I consult the warm, star-decked night; I am quite sure now that he is wrong, but I don't know how to tell him so. What can I offer him in exchange for the thing I am about to ask him? Where shall I find the words that induce a man to live? Oh you, all things around me, tell me, repeat to me that it is sweet to live, even with a body so grievously mutilated.