keep themselves warm and stepped over to the window. The rain was
pouring, a regular Normandy rain which one might have thought was
let loose and showered down by a furious hand, a slanting rain,
thick like a curtain, forming a kind of wall with oblique stripes,
a rain that lashed, splashed, deluged everything, a rain peculiar
to the neighborhood of Rouen, that watering pot of France.

The Officer looked for a long while at the inundated lawn, and yonder,
the swollen Andilles, which was overflowing; and with his fingers
he was drumming on the window-pane a waltz from the Rhineland, when
a noise caused him to turn around; it was his second in command,
Baron von Kelweingstein, holding a rank equivalent to that of
Captain.

The Major was a giant, with broad shoulders, graced by a fan-shaped
blond beard, flowing down his chest and forming a breast-shield.
His whole tall, solemn person suggested the image of a military
peacock, a peacock that would carry its tail spread on its chin.
He had blue eyes, cold and gentle; a cheek bearing the scar of a
sword wound inflicted during the Austrian war; and he was said to
be a kind hearted man as well as a brave officer.

Short, red faced, corpulent, tightly belted, the Captain wore,
cropped almost close, his red hair, the fiery filaments of which,
when under the reflection of certain lights, might have given the
impression as though his face had been rubbed with phosphorus. Two
teeth lost in a night orgy and brawl, he did not exactly remember
now, caused him to spit out indistinct words which one could not
always understand. He was bald only on the top of his head, like
a tonsured monk, with a crop of short, curly hair, golden and shiny,