I go into Fontan's. Crillon is with me—I picked him up from the little glass cupboard of his shop as I came out. He is finding it harder and harder to keep going; he has aged a lot, and his frame, so powerfully bolted together, cracks with rheumatism.
We sit down. Crillon groans and bends so low in his hand-to-hand struggle with the pains which beset him that I think his forehead is going to strike the marble-topped table.
He tells me in detail of his little business, which is going badly, and how he has confused glimpses of the bare and empty future which awaits him—when a sergeant with a fair mustache and eyeglasses makes his entry. This personage, whose collar shows white thunderbolts,[1] instead of a number, comes and sits near us. He orders a port wine and Victorine serves it with a smile. She smiles at random, and indistinctly, at all the men, like Nature.
[Footnote 1: Distinctive badge for Staff officers and others.—Tr.]
The newcomer takes off his cap, looks at the windows and yawns. "I'm bored," he says.
He comes nearer and freely offers us his talk. He sets himself chattering with spirited and easy grace, of men and things. He works at the Town Hall and knows a lot of secrets which he lets us into. He points to a couple of sippers at a table in the corner reserved for commercial people. "The grocer and the ironmonger," he says, "there's two that know how to go about it! At the beginning of the war there was a business crisis by the force of things, and they had to tighten their belts like the rest. Then they got their revenge and swept the dibs in and hoarded stuff up, and speculated, and they're still revenging themselves. You should see the stocks of goods they sit on in their cellars and wait for the rises that the newspapers foretell! They've got one excuse, it's true—there are others, bigger people, that are worse. Ah, you can say that the business people will have given a rich notion of their patriotism during the war!"
The fair young man stretches himself backward to his full length, with his heels together on the ground, his arms rigid on the table, and opens his mouth with all his might and for a long time. Then he goes on in a loud voice, careless who hears him, "Why, I saw the other day, at the Town Hall, piles of the Declarations of Profits, required by the Treasury. I don't know, of course, for I've not read them, but I'm as sure and certain as you are that all those innumerable piles of declarations are just so many columns of cod and humbug and lies!"
Intelligent and inexhaustible, accurately posted through the clerk's job in which he is sheltering, the sergeant relates with careless gestures his stories of scandals and huge profiteering, "while our good fellows are fighting." He talks and talks, and concludes by saying that after all he doesn't care a damn as long as they let him alone.
Monsieur Fontan is in the café. A woman leads up to him a tottering being whom she introduces to him. "He's ill, Monsieur Fontan, because he hasn't had enough to eat."
"Well now! And I'm ill, too," says Fontan jovially, "but it's because
I eat too much."