There are only two candles alight.  A wide wing of darkness overspreads the prostrate collection of men.

Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory, and some fragments of it reach my ears.  Just now, Papa Ramure is abusing the commandant.

“The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I’ve noticed he don’t know how to smoke.  He sucks all out at his pipes, and he burns ’em.  It isn’t a mouth he’s got in his head, it’s a snout.  The wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it’s coal.  Clay pipes, they’ll stick it better, but he roasts ’em brown all the same.  Talk about a snout!  So, old man, mind what I’m telling you, he’ll come to what doesn’t ever happen often; through being forced to get white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe’ll explode in his nose before everybody.  You’ll see.”

Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of the barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants.  The lines of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by side in their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth diversified snoring.

With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to me about himself:  “I’m a buyer of rags, you know,” he says, “or to put it better, a rag merchant.  But me, I’m wholesale; I buy from the little rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop—­a warehouse mind you!—­which I use as a depot.  I deal in all kinds of rags, from linen to jam-pots, but principally brush-handles, sacks, and old shoes; and naturally, I make a specialty of rabbit-skins.”

And a little later I still hear him:  “As for me, little and queer-shaped as I am, all the same I can carry a bin of two hundred pounds’ weight to the warehouse. up the steps, and my feet in sabots.  Once I had a to-do with a person—­”

“What I can’t abide,” cries Fouillade, all of a sudden, “is the exercises and marches they give us when we’re resting.  My back’s mincemeat, and I can’t get a snooze even, I’m that cramped.”

There is a metallic noise in Volpatte’s direction.  He has decided to take the stove, though he chides it constantly for the fatal fault of its perforations.

One who is but half asleep groans, “Oh, la, la!  When will this war finish!”

A cry of stubborn and mysterious rebellion bursts forth—­“They’d take the very skin off us!”

There follows a single, “Don’t fret yourself!” as darkly inconsequent as the cry of revolt.

I wake up a long time afterwards, as two o’clock is striking; and in a pallor of light which doubtless comes from the moon, I see the agitated silhouette of Pinegal.  A cock has crowed afar.  Pinegal raises himself halfway to a sitting position, and I hear his husky voice:  “Well now, it’s the middle of the night, and there’s a cock loosing his jaw.  He’s blind drunk, that cock.”  He laughs, and repeats, “He’s blind, that cock,” and he twists himself again into the woolens, and resumes his slumber with a gurgle in which snores are mingled with merriment.