before his _demitasse_.

"The pleasure was all mine, comrades!" Maurice replied to Coutard and
Picot, who, as they were leaving, thanked him for the cheese and wine.

He had also called for a cup of coffee and sat watching the
Lieutenant, whose hopefulness had communicated itself to him, a little
surprised, however, to hear him enumerate their strength at three
hundred thousand men, when it was not more than a hundred thousand,
and at his happy-go-lucky way of crushing the Prussians between the
two armies of Chalons and Metz. But then he, too, felt such need of
some comforting illusion! Why should he not continue to hope when all
those glorious memories of the past that he had evoked were still
ringing in his ears? The old inn was so bright and cheerful, with its
trellis hung with the purple grapes of France, ripening in the golden
sunlight! And again his confidence gained a momentary ascendancy over
the gloomy despair that the late events had engendered in him.

Maurice's eyes had rested for a moment on an officer of chasseurs
d'Afrique who, with his orderly, had disappeared at a sharp trot
around the corner of the silent house where the Emperor was quartered,
and when the orderly came back alone and stopped with his two horses
before the inn door he gave utterance to an exclamation of surprise:

"Prosper! Why, I supposed you were at Metz!"

It was a young man of Remilly, a simple farm-laborer, whom he had
known as a boy in the days when he used to go and spend his vacations
with his uncle Fouchard. He had been drawn, and when the war broke out
had been three years in Africa; he cut quite a dashing figure in his