s?"

"No, no, M. Benassis. To clear up the mystery, I should have to tell you
a long story, in which I do not exactly play the part of a hero; but you
have given me your confidence and I can readily give you mine."

"One moment, commandant," said the doctor. In answer to his summons,
Jacquotte appeared at once, and her master ordered tea. "You see,
commandant, at night when every one is sleeping, I do not sleep.... The
thought of my troubles lies heavily on me, and then I try to forget
them by taking tea. It produces a sort of nervous inebriation--a kind
of slumber, without which I could not live. Do you still decline to take
it?"

"For my own part," said Genestas, "I prefer your Hermitage."

"By all means. Jacquotte," said Benassis, turning to his housekeeper,
"bring in some wine and biscuits. We will both of us have our night-cap
after our separate fashions."

"That tea must be very bad for you!" Genestas remarked.

"It brings on horrid attacks of gout, but I cannot break myself of the
habit, it is too soothing; it procures for me a brief respite every
night, a few moments during which life becomes less of a burden....
Come. I am listening; perhaps your story will efface the painful
impressions left by the memories that I have just recalled."

Genestas set down his empty glass upon the chimney-piece. "After the
Retreat from Moscow," he said, "my regiment was stationed to recruit for
a while in a little town in Poland. We were quartered there, in fact,
till the Emperor returned, and we bought up horses at long prices. So
far so good. I ought to say that I had a friend in those days. More
than once during the Retreat I had owed my life to him. He was a
quartermaster, Renard by name; we could not but be like brothers
(military discipline apart) after what he had done for me. They billeted
us on the same house, a sort of shanty, a rat-hole of a place where a
whole family lived, though you would not have thought there was room to
stable a horse. This particular hovel belonged to some Jews who carried
on their six-and-thirty trades in it. The frost had not so stiffened the
old father Jew's fingers but that he could count gold fast enough; he
had thriven uncommonly during our reverses. That sort of gentry lives in
squalor and dies in gold.

"There were cellars underneath (lined with wood of course, the whole
house was built of wood); they had stowed their children away down
there, and one more particularly, a girl o