He had also called for a cup of coffee and sat watching the Lieutenant, whose hopefulness had communicated itself to him, a little surprised, however, to hear him enumerate their strength at three hundred thousand men, when it was not more than a hundred thousand, and at his happy-go-lucky way of crushing the Prussians between the two armies of Chalons and Metz.  But then he, too, felt such need of some comforting illusion!  Why should he not continue to hope when all those glorious memories of the past that he had evoked were still ringing in his ears?  The old inn was so bright and cheerful, with its trellis hung with the purple grapes of France, ripening in the golden sunlight!  And again his confidence gained a momentary ascendancy over the gloomy despair that the late events had engendered in him.

Maurice’s eyes had rested for a moment on an officer of chasseurs d’Afrique who, with his orderly, had disappeared at a sharp trot around the corner of the silent house where the Emperor was quartered, and when the orderly came back alone and stopped with his two horses before the inn door he gave utterance to an exclamation of surprise: 

“Prosper!  Why, I supposed you were at Metz!”

It was a young man of Remilly, a simple farm-laborer, whom he had known as a boy in the days when he used to go and spend his vacations with his uncle Fouchard.  He had been drawn, and when the war broke out had been three years in Africa; he cut quite a dashing figure in his sky-blue jacket, his wide red trousers with blue stripes and red woolen belt, with his sun-dried face and strong, sinewy limbs that indicated great strength and activity.

“Hallo! it’s Monsieur Maurice!  I’m glad to see you!”

He took things very easily, however, conducting the steaming horses to the stable, and to his own, more particularly, giving a paternal attention.  It was no doubt his affection for the noble animal, contracted when he was a boy and rode him to the plow, that had made him select the cavalry arm of the service.

“We’ve just come in from Monthois, more than ten leagues at a stretch,” he said when he came back, “and Poulet will be wanting his breakfast.”

Poulet was the horse.  He declined to eat anything himself; would only accept a cup of coffee.  He had to wait for his officer, who had to wait for the Emperor; he might be five minutes, and then again he might be two hours, so his officer had told him to put the horses in the stable.  And as Maurice, whose curiosity was aroused, showed some disposition to pump him, his face became as vacant as a blank page.

“Can’t say.  An errand of some sort—­papers to be delivered.”

But Rochas looked at the chasseur with an eye of tenderness, for the uniform awakened old memories of Africa.

“Eh! my lad, where were you stationed out there?”

“At Medeah, Lieutenant.”