There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations.

Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still. I had followed the manoeuvres for several days on end without being able to go to bed. How blissful then was my return to the hotel! As I got into bed I seemed to have escaped at last from the hands of enchanters and sorcerers like those who people the “romances” beloved of our forebears in the seventeenth century. My sleep that night and the lazy morning that followed it were no more than a charming fairy tale. Charming; beneficent perhaps also. I reminded myself that the worst sufferings have their place of sanctuary, that one can always, when all else fails, find rest. These thoughts carried me far.

On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-Loup had to stay in barracks, I used often to go and visit him there. It was a long way; I had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either side of which I had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost always over this high ground, and swept round the buildings erected on three sides of the barrack-square, which howled incessantly like a cave of the winds. While I waited for Robert—he being engaged on some duty or other—outside the door of his room or in the mess, talking to some of his friends to whom he had introduced me (and whom later I came to see from time to time, even when he was not going to be there), looking down from the window at the countryside three hundred feet below me, bare now except where recently sown fields, often still soaked with rain and glittering in the sun, showed a few strips of green, of the brilliance and translucent limpidity of enamel, I often heard him discussed by the others, and I soon learned what a popular favourite he was. Among many of the volunteers, belonging to other squadrons, sons of rich business or professional men who looked at aristocratic high society only from outside and without penetrating its enclosure, the attraction which they naturally felt towards what they knew of Saint-Loup’s character was reinforced by the glamour that attached in their eyes to the young man whom, on Saturday evenings, when they went on pass to Paris, they had seen supping in the Café de la Paix with the Duc d’Uzès and the Prince d’Orléans. And on that account they associated his handsome face, his casual way of walking and saluting, the perpetual dance of his monocle, the jaunty eccentricity of his service dress—the caps always too high, the breeches of too fine a cloth and too pink a shade—with a notion of elegance and “tone” which, they averred, was lacking in the best turned-out officers in the regiment, even the majestic Captain to whom I had been indebted for the privilege of sleeping in barracks, who seemed, in comparison, too pompous and almost common.

One of them mentioned that the Captain had bought a new horse. “He can buy as many horses as he likes. I passed Saint-Loup on Sunday morning in the Allée des Acacias. He’s got altogether more style on a horse!” replied his companion with the knowledge of experience, for these young men belonged to a class which, if it does not frequent the same houses and know the same people, yet, thanks to money and leisure, does not differ from the nobility in its experience of all those refinements of life which money can procure. At most their elegance, in the matter of clothes, for instance, had something more studied, more impeccable about it than that relaxed and careless elegance which had so delighted my grandmother in Saint-Loup. It gave quite a thrill to these sons of big stockbrokers or bankers, as they sat eating oysters after the theatre, to see Sergeant Saint-Loup at an adjoining table. And what a tale there was to tell in barracks on Monday night, after a week-end leave, by one of them who was in Robert’s squadron, and to whom he had said how d’ye do “most civilly,” while another, who was not in the same squadron, was quite positive that in spite of this Saint-Loup had recognised him, for two or three times he had put up his monocle and stared in the speaker’s direction.

“Yes, my brother saw him at the Paix,” said another, who had been spending the day with his mistress. “Apparently his dress coat was cut too loose and didn’t fit him.”

“What was the waistcoat like?”

“He wasn’t wearing a white waistcoat; it was purple, with sort of palms on it—smashing!”

To the “old soldiers” (sons of the soil who had never heard of the Jockey Club and simply put Saint-Loup in the category of ultra-rich non-commissioned officers, in which they included all those who, whether bankrupt or not, lived in a certain style, whose income or debts ran into several figures, and who were generous towards their men), the gait, the monocle, the breeches, the caps of Saint-Loup, even if they saw in them nothing particularly aristocratic, furnished nevertheless just as much interest and meaning. They recognised in these peculiarities the character, the style which they had assigned once and for all to this most popular of the “stripes” in the regiment, manners like no one else’s, scornful indifference to what his superior officers might think, which seemed to them the natural corollary of his kindness to his subordinates. The morning cup of coffee in the canteen, the afternoon rest in the barrack-room, seemed pleasanter when some old soldier fed the greedy and idle squad with some savoury tit-bit about a cap of Saint-Loup’s.

“It was the height of my pack.”

“Come off it, old chap, you’re having us on, it couldn’t have been the height of your pack,” interrupted a young college graduate who hoped by using these slang terms not to appear a greenhorn, and by venturing on this contradiction to obtain confirmation of a fact which enchanted him.

“Oh, so it wasn’t the height of my pack, wasn’t it? You measured it, I suppose! I tell you this much, the CO glared at him as if he’d have liked to put him in clink. But you needn’t think the great Saint-Loup was rattled, oh no, he came and he went, and down with his head and up with his head, and always that trick with the monocle. We’ll see what the Cap’n has to say when he hears. Oh, very likely he’ll say nothing, but you may be sure he won’t be pleased. But there’s nothing so wonderful about that cap. I hear he’s got thirty of ’em and more at home in town.”

“How come you heard about it, old man? From our blasted Corp?” asked the young graduate, pedantically displaying the new grammatical forms which he had only recently acquired and with which he took a pride in garnishing his conversation.

“How come I heard it? From his batman of course!”

“Ah, there’s a bloke who knows when he’s well off!”

“I should think so! He’s got more brass than I have, that’s for sure! And besides he gives him all his own belongings and everything. He wasn’t getting enough grub in the canteen, he says. So along comes de Saint-Loup and gives cooky hell: ‘I want him to be properly fed, d’you hear,’ he says, ‘and I don’t care what it costs.’ ”

The old soldier made up for the triviality of the words quoted by the emphasis of his tone, in a feeble imitation of the speaker which had an immense success.

On leaving the barracks I would take a stroll, and then, to fill up the time before I went, as I did every evening, to dine with Saint-Loup at the hotel in which he and his friends had established their mess, I walked back to my own, as soon as the sun went down, so as to have a couple of hours in which to rest and read.