The Major, Graf von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant,
was reading his newspaper, lying back in a great armchair,
with his booted feet on the beautiful marble fire-place,
where his spurs had made two holes, which grew deeper
every day, during the three months that he had been
in the chateau of Urville.
A cup of coffee was smoking on a small, inlaid table,
which was stained with liquors, burnt by cigars, notched
by the pen-knife of the victorious officer, who occasionally
would stop while sharpening a pencil, to jot down
figures, or to make a drawing on it, just as it took
his fancy.
When he had read his letters and the German newspapers,
which his baggage-master had brought him, he got up,
and after throwing three or four enormous pieces of
green wood on to the fire, for those gentlemen were
gradually cutting down the park in order to keep themselves
warm, he went to the window. The rain was descending
in torrents, a regular Normandy rain, which looked
as if it were being poured out by some furious hand,
a slanting rain, which was as thick as a curtain, and
which formed a kind of wall with oblique stripes, and
which deluged everything, a regular rain, such as
one frequently experiences in the neighborhood of
Rouen, which is the watering-pot of France.
For a long time the officer looked at the sodden turf,
and at the swollen Andelle beyond it, which was overflowing
its banks; and he was drumming a waltz from the Rhine
on the window-panes, with his fingers, when a noise
made him turn round; it was his second in command,
Captain Baron von Kelweinstein.
The major was a giant, with broad shoulders, and a
long, fair-like beard, which hung like a cloth on
his chest. His whole, solemn person suggested
the idea of a military peacock, a peacock who was carrying
his tail spread out on to his breast. He had
cold, gentle, blue eyes, and the scar from a sword-cut,
which he had received in the war with Austria; he
was said to be an honorable man, as well as a brave
officer.
The captain, a short, red-faced man, who was tightly
girthed in at the waist, had his red hair cropped
quite close to his head, and in certain lights he
almost looked as if he had been rubbed over with phosphorus.
He had lost two front teeth one night, though he could
not quite remember how, and this made him speak so
that he could not always be understood, and he had
a bald patch on the top of his head, which made him
look rather like a monk, with a fringe of curly, bright,
golden hair round the circle of bare skin.
The commandant shook hands with him, and drank his
cup of coffee (the sixth that morning), at a draught,
while he listened to his subordinate’s report
of what had occurred; and then they both went to the
window, and declared that it was a very unpleasant
outlook. The major, who was a quiet man, with
a wife at home, could accommodate himself to everything;
but the captain, who was rather fast, who was in the
habit of frequenting low resorts, and who was much
given to women, was mad at having been shut up for
three months in the compulsory chastity of that wretched
hole.
