There are only two candles alight. A wide wing of darkness
overspreads the prostrate collection of men.
Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory,
and some fragments of it reach my ears. Just now, Papa Ramure is
abusing the commandant.
"The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I've
noticed he don't know how to smoke. He sucks all out at his pipes,
and he burns 'em. It isn't a mouth he's got in his head, it's a
snout. The wood splits and scorches, and instead of being wood, it's
coal. Clay pipes, they'll stick it better, but he roasts 'em brown
all the same. Talk about a snout! So, old man, mind what I'm telling
you, he'll come to what doesn't ever happen often; through being
forced to get white-hot and baked to the marrow, his pipe'll explode
in his nose before everybody. You'll see."
Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of
the barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The
lines of identical bundles formed by these beings rolled up side by
side in their blankets seem a sort of huge organ, which sends forth
diversified snoring.
With his nose already in his blanket, I hear Marthereau talking to
me about himself: "I'm a buyer of rags, you know," he says, "or to
put it better, a rag merchant. But me, I'm wholesale; I buy from the
little rag-and-bone men of the streets, and I have a shop--a
warehouse mind you!--which I use as a depot.
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