ng the consequences it
may bring? I don't know that, either. The future will decide. For the
present there is only one thing certain, the fact, I tell you again,
that I killed Captain Morhange.

"I killed him. And, since you want me to specify the reason, you
understand that I am not going to torture my brain to turn it into a
romance for you, or commence by recounting in the naturalistic manner
of what stuff my first trousers were made, or, as the neo-Catholics
would have it, how often I went as a child to confession, and how much
I liked doing it. I have no taste for useless exhibitions. You will
find that this recital begins strictly at the time when I met
Morhange.

"And first of all, I tell you, however much it has cost my peace of
mind and my reputation, I do not regret having known him. In a word,
apart from all question of false friendship, I am convicted of a black
ingratitude in having killed him. It is to him, it is to his knowledge
of rock inscriptions, that I owe the only thing that has raised my
life in interest above the miserable little lives dragged out by my
companions at Auxonne, and elsewhere.

"This being understood, here are the facts:"

[NOTE: From this point on begins an extended narrative;
indeed it may be most of the remaining book.
I was changing the quoting, until I reached the end
of the chapter and found that it continued on from there.]

It was in the Arabian Office at Wargla, when I was a lieutenant, that
I first heard the name, Morhange. And I must add that it was for me
the occasion of an attack of bad humor. We were having difficult
times. The hostility of the Sultan of Morocco was latent. At Touat,
where the assassination of Flatters and of Frescaly had already been
concocted, connivance was being given to the plots of our enemies.
Touat was the center of conspiracies, of razzias, of defections, and
at the same time, the depot of supply for the insatiable nomads. The
Governors of Algeria, Tirman, Cambon, Laferriere, demanded its
occupation. The Ministers of War tacitly agreed.... But there was
Parliament, which did nothing at all, because of England, because of
Germany, and above all because of a certain _Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen_, which prescribed that insurrection is the
most sacred of duties, even when the insurgents are savages who cut
your head off. In short, the military authority could only, at its own
discretion, increase the southern garrison