Papa Blaire displays in his well-worn mouth a set of new teeth, so resplendent that one can see nothing in all his poor face except those gayly-dight jaws.  The great event of these foreign teeth’s establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners.  He is rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly.  Now that he has become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant.  For the moment he is dejected, because—­a miracle—­he cannot wash himself.  Deeply sunk in a corner, he half opens a lack-luster eye, bites and masticates his old soldier’s mustache—­not long ago the only ornament on his face—­and from time to time spits out a hair.

Fouillade is shivering, cold-smitten, or yawns, depressed and shabby.  Marthereau has not changed at all.  He is still as always well-bearded, his eye round and blue, and his legs so short that his trousers seem to be slipping continually from his waist and dropping to his feet.  Cocon is always Cocon by the dried and parchment-like head wherein sums are working; but a recurrence of lice, the ravages of which we see overflowing on to his neck and wrists, has isolated him for a week now in protracted tussles which leave him surly when he returns among us.  Paradis retains unimpaired the same quantum of good color and good temper; he is unchanging, perennial.  We smile when he appears in the distance, placarded on the background of sandbags like a new poster.  Nothing has changed in Pepin either, whom we can just see taking a stroll—­we can tell him behind by his red-and-white squares of an oilcloth draught-board, and in front by his blade-like face and the gleam of a knife in his cold gray look.  Nor has Volpatte changed, with his leggings, his shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian tatooed with dirt; nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some time by blood-red streaks in his eyes—­for some unknown and mysterious reason.  Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation.  When the post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and then retires into himself.  His clerkly hands indite numerous and careful postcards.  He does not know of Eudoxie’s end.  Lamuse said no more to any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped her body.  He regretted—­I knew it—­his whispered confidence to me that evening, and up to his death he kept the horrible affair sacred to himself, with tenacious bashfulness.  So we see Farfadet continuing to live his airy existence with the living likeness of that fair hair, which he only leaves for the scarce monosyllables of his contact with us.  Corporal Bertrand has still the same soldierly and serious mien among us; he is always ready with his tranquil smile to answer all questions with lucid explanations, to help each of us to do his duty.

We are chatting as of yore, as not long since.  But the necessity of speaking in low tones distinguishes our remarks and imposes on them a lugubrious tranquillity.