"It is true," said he, "I am very hungry."
He followed the woman, who had a healthy, ruddy face; she led him to a ground-floor room, in which were tables covered with oil-cloth.
"Make haste," he remarked, "for I am in a great hurry."
A plump Flemish servant-girl hastened to lay the cloth, and he looked at her with a feeling of comfort.
"That was the trouble," he thought; "I had not breakfasted."
He pounced upon the bread, bit a mouthful, and then slowly laid it back on the table, and did not touch it again. A wagoner was sitting at another table, and he said to him,—
"Why is their bread so bitter?"
The wagoner was a German, and did not understand him; he returned to his horse. An hour later he had left St. Pol, and was proceeding toward Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras. What did he do during the drive? What was he thinking of? As in the morning, he looked at the trees, the roofs, the ploughed fields, and the diversities of a landscape which every turn in the road changes, as he passed them. To see a thousand different objects for the first and last time is most melancholy! Travelling is birth and death at every moment. Perhaps in the vaguest region of his mind he made a comparison between the changing horizon and human existence, for everything in this life is continually flying before us. Shadow and light are blended; after a dazzling comes an eclipse; every event is a turn in the road, and all at once you are old. You feel something like a shock, all is black, you distinguish an obscure door, and the gloomy horse of life which dragged you, stops, and you see a veiled, unknown form unharnessing it. Twilight was setting in at the moment when the school-boys, leaving school, saw this traveller enter Tinques. He did not halt there, but as he left the village, a road-mender, who was laying stones, raised his head, and said to him,—
"Your horse is very tired."
The poor brute, in fact, could not get beyond a walk.