“That is right,” said Benassis, “Jacquotte has lighted a fire for you.  If you want anything, there is a bell-pull close to the head of the bed.”

“I am not likely to want anything, however small, it seems to me,” exclaimed Genestas.  “There is even a boot-jack.  Only an old trooper knows what a boot-jack is worth!  There are times, when one is out on a campaign, sir, when one is ready to burn down a house to come by a knave of a boot-jack.  After a few marches, one on the top of another, or above all, after an engagement, there are times when a swollen foot and the soaked leather will not part company, pull as you will; I have had to lie down in my boots more than once.  One can put up with the annoyance so long as one is by oneself.”

The commandant’s wink gave a kind of profound slyness to his last utterance; then he began to make a survey.  Not without surprise, he saw that the room was neatly kept, comfortable, and almost luxurious.

“What splendor!” was his comment.  “Your own room must be something wonderful.”

“Come and see,” said the doctor; “I am your neighbor, there is nothing but the staircase between us.”

Genestas was again surprised when he entered the doctor’s room, a bare-looking apartment with no adornment on the walls save an old-fashioned wall-paper of a yellowish tint with a pattern of brown roses over it; the color had gone in patches here and there.  There was a roughly painted iron bedstead, two gray cotton curtains were suspended from a wooden bracket above it, and a threadbare strip of carpet lay at the foot; it was like a bed in a hospital.  By the bed-head stood a rickety cupboard on four feet with a door that continually rattled with a sound like castanets.  Three chairs and a couple of straw-bottomed armchairs stood about the room, and on a low chest of drawers in walnut wood stood a basin, and a ewer of obsolete pattern with a lid, which was kept in place by a leaden rim round the top of the vessel.  This completed the list of the furniture.

The grate was empty.  All the apparatus required for shaving lay about in front of an old mirror suspended above the painted stone chimney-piece by a bit of string.  The floor was clean and carefully swept, but it was worn and splintered in various places, and there were hollows in it here and there.  Gray cotton curtains bordered with a green fringe adorned the two windows.  The scrupulous cleanliness maintained by Jacquotte gave a certain air of distinction to this picture of simplicity, but everything in it, down to the round table littered with stray papers, and the very pens on the writing-desk, gave the idea of an almost monastic life—­a life so wholly filled with thought and feeling of a wider kind that outward surroundings had come to be matters of no moment.  An open door allowed the commandant to see the smaller room, which doubtless the doctor seldom occupied.  It was scarcely kept in the same condition as the adjoining apartment; a few dusty books lay strewn about over the no less dusty shelves, and from the rows of labeled bottles it was easy to guess that the place was devoted rather to the dispensing of drugs than scientific studies.