"No, sir; the servant has gone."
"Very well," said my father. Then to me: "Come now; get your supper, and off to bed. François!"
I was led off grumbling.
Joubert tucked me into bed; and as I lay listening to the carriage-wheels from the Champs Elysées bearing people home from supper-party and theatre, the journey, the Schloss Lichtenberg, the mysterious pine-forest, the drums and tramping soldiers of Carlsruhe and Mayence, the blue Rhine—all rose before me as a picture. It was the First Act of my life, an Act tragic enough; and, as the curtain of sleep fell upon it, the glimmer of the jägers' torches still struggled through that veil, with the sound of the swords, the murmur of the wind in the pine-trees, and the far-off barking of the fox in the wood.
CHAPTER XIII I FALL INTO DISGRACE
I was dreaming of the Countess Feliciani. She had changed all of a sudden, by the alchemy of dreamland, into little Carl. We were running together down the forest path in the woods of Lichtenberg, and the Stone Man was pursuing us, when a violent pull on my right leg awakened me, and Joubert and a burst of sunshine replaced dreamland and its shadows.
It was one of Joubert's pleasant ways of awakening a child from his sleep, to catch him by the foot and nearly haul him out of bed.
Oh, the agony of having to get up, straight, without any preliminary stretching and yawning; to get up with that dead, blank tiredness of childhood hanging on one like a cloak—and get into a cold bath!