Yet something about him struck me. It was not his face for I could not see it nor was it his uniform which was disguised in an ample cloak, it was the extraordinary disproportion between the number of different points past which his body flitted and the minute number of seconds employed in an exit, which resembled an attempted sortie by someone besieged. This made me believe, though I could not formally recognise him—whether by his outline, his slimness or his gait, or—even by his velocity but by a sort of ubiquity peculiar to him—that it was Saint-Loup. Who-ever he was, the officer with this gift of occupying so many different points in space in so short a time, had disappeared, without noticing me, in a cross street, and I stood asking myself whether or not I should enter this hotel the modest appearance of which made me doubt if it was really Saint-Loup who had emerged from it. I now remembered that Saint-Loup had got himself unhappily mixed up in an espionage affair owing to the appearance of his name in some letters seized upon a German officer. Full justice had been rendered him by the military authority but in spite of myself I related that fact to what I now saw. Was that hotel used as a meeting-place by spies? The officer had been gone some moments when I saw several privates of various arms enter and this added to my suspicions; and I was extremely thirsty. “It is probable I can get something to drink here,” I said to myself and I took advantage of that to try and satisfy my curiosity in spite of my apprehensions. I do not think, however, that it was curiosity which decided me to climb up the several steps of the little staircase at the end of which the door of a sort of vestibule was open, no doubt on account of the heat. I believed at first that I should not be able to satisfy it for I saw several people come and ask for rooms, to whom the reply was given that there was not a single one vacant.
Soon I grasped that all the people of the place had against them was that they did not belong to that nest of spies, for an ordinary sailor presented himself and they immediately gave him No. 28. I was able, thanks to the darkness, without being seen myself, to observe several soldiers and two men of the working class who were talking quietly in a small, stuffy room showily decorated with coloured portraits of women out of magazines and illustrated reviews. The men were expressing patriotic opinions:
“There’s no help for it, one must do like the rest,” said one. “Certainly, I don’t think I’m going to be killed,” another said in answer to a wish I had not heard, and who, I gathered, was leaving the following day for a dangerous post. “Just think of it, at twenty-two! It would be pretty stiff after only doing six months!” he cried in a tone revealing, more even than a desire to live, the justice of his reasoning as though being only twenty-two ought to give him a better chance of not being killed, in fact, that it was impossible he should be. “In Paris it’s wonderful,” said another, “one wouldn’t think there was a war on.
Are you joining up, Julot?” “Of course I’m joining up. I want to go and have a smack at those dirty Boches.” “That Joffre! He’s a chap who slept with Minister’s wives, he’s not done anything.” “It’s rotten to hear that sort of stuff,” interrupted an aviator who was somewhat older, turning towards the last speaker, a workman. “I advise you not to talk like that when you get to the front or the poilus will very soon have you out of it.” The banality of this conversation gave me no great desire to hear more and I was about to go up or down when my attention was roused by hearing the following words which made me tremble. “It is extraordinary that the patron has not come back yet, at this time of night. I don’t know where he’ll find those chains.” “But the other is already chained up.” “Yes, of course he’s chained—in a way. If I were chained like that I’d pretty soon free myself.” “But the padlock is locked.” “Oh! It’s locked all right but if one tried, one could force it open. The trouble is the chains aren’t long enough. You aren’t going to explain that sort of thing to me, considering I was beating him the whole night till my hands bled.” “Well, you’ll have to take a turn at it to-night.” “No, it’s not my turn, it’s Maurice’s. It will be my turn on Sunday. The patron promised me.” Now I knew why the sailor’s strong arms were needed.
If peaceful citizens had been refused admittance, it was not because the hotel was a nest of spies. An atrocious crime was going to be consummated if someone did not arrive in time to discover it and have the guilty arrested. On this threatened yet peaceful night all this seemed like a dream story and I deliberately entered the hotel with the determination of one who wants to see justice done with the enthusiasm of a poet. I lightly touched my hat and those present, without disturbing themselves, answered my salute more or less politely. “Will you please tell me whom I can ask for a room and for something to drink?” “Wait a minute, the patron has gone out.” “But the chief is upstairs,” suggested one of them. “You know perfectly well you can’t disturb him.” “Do you think they’ll give me a room?” “Yes, I believe so, 43 must be free,” said the young man who was sure of not being killed because he was only twenty-two, making room for me on the sofa beside him. “It would be a good thing to open the window, there’s an awful lot of smoke here,” said the aviator, and indeed each of them had a pipe or a cigarette. “Yes, that’s all right, but shut the shutters first; you know lights are forbidden on account of zeppelins.” “There won’t be any more zeppelins, the papers said that they’d all been shot down.” “They won’t come! They won’t come! What do you know about it?
When you’ve been fifteen months at the front as I have, when you’ve shot down your five German aeroplanes, then you’ll be able to talk. It’s absurd to believe the papers. They were over Compiègne yesterday and killed a mother with her two children.” The young man who hoped not to be killed and who had an energetic, open and sympathetic face spoke with ardent eyes and with profound pity. “There’s no news of big Julot. His godmother hasn’t had a letter from him for eight days and it’s the first time he has been so long without giving her any news.” “Who’s his godmother?” “The lady who keeps the place of convenience below Olympia.” “Do they sleep together?” “What are you talking about, she’s a perfectly respectable married woman. She sends him money every week because she’s got a good heart. She’s a jolly good sort.” “So you know big Julot?” “Do I know him?” The young man of twenty-two answered hotly. “He’s one of my most intimate friends. There aren’t many I think as much of as I do of him, he’s a good pal, always ready to do one a turn.
It would be a bad look out if anything happened to him.” Someone proposed a game of dice and from the fevered fashion in which the young man cast them and called out the results with his eyes starting out of his head, it was easy to see that he had the temperament of a gambler. I could not quite grasp what someone else said to him just then but he suddenly cried in a tone of deep resentment. “Julot a pimp! He may say he is but he bloody well isn’t. I’ve seen him pay his women. Yes I have. I don’t say that Algerian Jeanne hasn’t ever given him a bit. But never more than five francs, a woman in a house, earning more than fifty francs a day. To think of a man letting a woman give him only five francs. And now she’s at the front, she’s having a pretty hard life, I admit, but she earns what she likes and she never sends him anything. Julot a pimp, indeed there’d be plenty of pimps at that rate. Not only he isn’t a pimp, but I think he’s a fool into the bargain.”
The oldest of the party, whom no doubt the patron had entrusted with keeping a certain amount of order, having gone out for a moment, only heard the end of the conversation but he stared at me and seemed visibly annoyed at the
