Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise. It
is the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded
simpleton in spectacles. When he has taken off his greatcoat and
appears in his jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about
showing his legs. We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette
of a bearded hippopotamus. He blows, sighs, and mutters.
Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his bead, and says to me,
"Look at him. Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge. When
we ask him what he does in civil life, he won't say 'I'm a school
teacher' he says, leering at you from under his specs with the half
of his eyes, 'I'm a professor.' When he gets up very early to go to
mass, he says, 'I've got belly-ache, I must go and take a turn round
the corner and no mistake.'"
A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland: "Where
I live, it's just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes. There's my old
man there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he's working or
resting, he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the
stove."
I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialized
and technical character: "That's why he makes a paillon. D'you know
what a paillon is? You take a stalk of green corn and peel it. You
split it in two and then in two again, and you have different sizes.
Then with a thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the
stem of his pipe--"
The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.
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