He was quite young, not more than eighteen or so, a fine fellow in every way, but unfit for the life he had chosen. He was a rebel, at least against discipline and restraint.
He had joined the Legion expecting, no doubt, an adventurous life hunting down Arabs or fighting pitched battles with the tribes; he did not enjoy the reality, eternal drill, with road-making, route-marching, and odd jobs as the only alternatives.
However, he possessed considerable force of character and power of restraint over himself, and after the first month or so settled down—or seemed to.
He had no special chum, but he was popular in his way and friendly with Jacques. He told the latter his history—how he had been brought up to do as he liked by a mother who doted on him, how his mother had died, and his father, a vine-grower near Avignon, had tried to make him work; how he had rebelled, not against work, but against the monotony of regular labour, how a man in the cavalry had told him of the glorious times to be had in the Legion, and how he had enlisted.
"Glorious times, truly," said Jacques as he was telling me this, "up at daybreak, to bed at dark, drill, Swedish exercises, route-marching, firing-range—the life of a camel and a halfpenny a day."
However that might be, Raboustel took his gruel, to use the expression of Jacques, and didn't grumble over the taste of it. A bad sign. Everyone grumbles in the Legion, and naturally, for the man who has sold his body and soul for a halfpenny a day feels that he has something to grumble at. The silent men and the men who keep up an appearance of unnatural cheerfulness are the men likely to make trouble.
For the first couple of months, then, Raboustel, loathing the life that had seized upon him, but saying nothing or next to nothing about his feelings on the matter, seemed on the highway to one of the hundred forms of revolt common to légionnaires.
Any day Jacques would not have been surprised to hear that Raboustel had mutilated himself, or made an attempt to escape, or committed some act equally mad and equally sure to lead to punishment or death.
But time went on and nothing happened, and then, strange to say, Raboustel, so far from trying to run away or attempting some mad act, all at once became cheerful—really and unfeignedly cheerful—and began to grumble at the small pin-pricks of an Algerian soldier's life just like a healthy légionnaire. He had fallen in love.
One evening, passing through Kassim Street, in the native quarter of the town, he had stopped to admire the brass-work exposed for sale in a little shop near the corner where Kassim Street is cut by the Street of the Crescent. The owner of the shop, a Spanish Jew, Abraham Misas by name, was not there. His daughter was looking after the place in his absence.