Dame Virginie, copper-coloured, thick-lipped, with woolly hair wrapped in a piece of red cotton—drunk herself—was sponging the blood from a head of fair hair. A tall spahi, with a young, fresh-coloured face, and hair the colour of ripe corn, lay there unconscious with broken head, while Dame Virginie, assisted by a black wench more drunk than her mistress, was sponging his wound with fresh water and applying compresses of vinegar. She was not actuated by motives of compassion—certainly not, but by fear of the police. She was really uneasy, Virginie Scholastique, for the blood continued to flow. It had filled a whole bowl and it would not stop, and the old harridan was sobered by her anxiety.
Jean was seated on a bench in a corner, more drunk than all the rest, yet still holding himself stiffly, his eyes staring and glassy.
He it was who had inflicted this wound with an iron latch wrenched off a door, and he was still holding the latch in his clenched hand, unconscious of the blow he had struck with it.
It was a month since his recovery, and every evening he could have been seen dragging himself from tavern to tavern, foremost among the dissolute and drunken, practising himself in the insolent airs of rake and cynic.
There was still much in this behaviour that was due to mere childishness, but the result was the same; he had travelled along a terrible road during this month of suffering. He had devoured novels, whose every detail was new to his imagination, and he had assimilated all their unwholesome extravagances. And then he had gone the round of the easy conquests of St Louis, coloured women and white, among whom his handsome person had secured for him unresisted possession.
And to crown everything, he had begun to drink.
Oh you who lead a well-regulated domestic life, seated peacefully day after day by your fireside, do not pass judgment on the sailors and spahis, men of ardent natures, whom their destiny has plunged into abnormal conditions of life upon the wide ocean, or in the far away lands of the sun, exposed to unheard of privations, to desires and temptations of which you have no conception. Do not pass judgment on these exiles, or these wanderers, whose sufferings, joys, tortured imaginings are unknown to you.
So Jean began to drink, and he drank more than the others; he drank prodigiously.
“How can he do it?” said those around him, “a man who has never been accustomed to it.”