I quite see that it’s a slender advantage, and as, after all, another guest may arrive tomorrow, it would not be worth your while to choose that particular hotel on such precarious grounds. No, it’s for its appearance that I recommend it. The rooms are rather attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there’s something reassuring about it.” But to me, less of an artist than Saint-Loup, the pleasure that an attractive house might give one was superficial, almost non-existent, and could not calm my incipient anguish, as painful as that which I used to feel long ago at Combray when my mother did not come upstairs to say good night, or that which I felt on the evening of my arrival at Balbec in the room with the unnaturally high ceiling, which smelt of vetiver. Saint-Loup read all this in my fixed stare.

“A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor fellow; you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking to you about tapestries which you won’t even have the heart to look at. I know the room they’ll put you in; personally I find it most cheerful, but I can quite understand that it won’t have the same effect on you with your sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t understand you. I don’t feel the same myself, but I can put myself in your place.”

At that moment a sergeant who was exercising a horse on the square, entirely absorbed in making the animal jump, disregarding the salutes of passing troopers, but hurling volleys of oaths at such as got in his way, turned with a smile to Saint-Loup and, seeing that he had a friend with him, saluted us. But his horse, frothing, at once reared. Saint-Loup flung himself at its head, caught it by the bridle, succeeded in quieting it and returned to my side.

“Yes,” he resumed, “I assure you that I fully understand and sympathise with what you are going through. I feel wretched,” he went on, laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder, “when I think that if I could have stayed with you tonight, I might have been able, by chatting to you till morning, to relieve you of a little of your unhappiness. I could lend you some books, but you won’t want to read if you’re feeling like that. And I shan’t be able to get anyone else to stand in for me here: I’ve done it twice running because my girl came down to see me.”

And he knitted his brows with vexation and also in the effort to decide, like a doctor, what remedy he might best apply to my disease.

“Run along and light the fire in my quarters,” he called to a trooper who passed by. “Hurry up; get a move on!”

Then, once more, he turned towards me, and once more his monocle and his peering, myopic gaze testified to our great friendship.

“No, really, you here, in these barracks where I’ve thought so much about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes, I feel I must be dreaming! But how is your health on the whole? A little better, I hope. You must tell me all about yourself presently. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang about too long on the square, there’s the devil of a wind. I don’t feel it now myself, but you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your catching cold. And what about your work? Have you settled down to it yet? No? You are an odd fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing. What a pity it is that it’s the second-raters like me who are always ready to work, while the ones who could, don’t want to! There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is. Her Proudhon never leaves me.”

A tall, handsome, majestic officer emerged with slow and solemn steps from the foot of a staircase. Saint-Loup saluted him and arrested the perpetual mobility of his body for the time it took him to hold his hand against the peak of his cap. But he had flung himself into the action with such force, straightening himself with so sharp a movement, and, the salute ended, brought his hand down with so abrupt a release, altering all the positions of shoulder, leg and monocle, that this moment was one not so much of immobility as of a vibrant tension in which the excessive movements which he had just made and those on which he was about to embark were neutralised. Meanwhile the officer, without coming any nearer, calm, benevolent, dignified, imperial, representing, in short, the direct opposite of Saint-Loup, also raised his hand, but unhurriedly, to the peak of his cap.

“I must just say a word to the Captain,” whispered Saint-Loup. “Be a good fellow, and go and wait for me in my room. It’s the second on the right, on the third floor. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

And setting off at the double, preceded by his monocle which fluttered in every direction, he made straight for the slow and stately captain whose horse had just been brought round and who, before preparing to mount, was giving orders with a studied nobility of gesture as in some historical painting, and as though he were setting forth to take part in some battle of the First Empire, whereas he was simply going to ride home, to the house which he had taken for the period of his service at Doncières, and which stood in a square that was named, as though in an ironical anticipation of the arrival of this Napoleonid, Place de la République. I started to climb the staircase, nearly slipping on each of its nail-studded steps, catching glimpses of barrack-rooms, their bare walls bordered with a double line of beds and kits. I was shown Saint-Loup’s room. I stood for a moment outside its closed door, for I could hear movement—something stirring, something being dropped. I felt the room was not empty, that there was somebody there.