in tedious monotony, in an eternal struggle with sordid everyday cares.
He had worn himself out over all the exigencies of a petty bourgeois
existence, like a poor man ashamed of his poverty, making pathetic
efforts to conceal a tear in his clothes and always seeing the telltale
hole staring out from under the covering. For thirty-nine years he had
never swerved from disciplining himself to abstemiousness, and there was
much gold on his uniform, but very little in his pocket. As a matter of
fact, he had been quite ready for some time to quit. He was thoroughly
tired of the cheap pleasure of tyrannizing over the young officers on
the drill ground.

But then the miracle occurred! Over night the grouchy, obscure old
gentleman changed into a sort of national hero, a European celebrity. He
was "the Victor of ----!" It was like in a fairy tale, when the good
fairy appears and frees the enchanted prince from his hideous disguise,
and he emerges in his glowing youth, surrounded by knights and lackeys,
and enters his magnificent castle.

To he sure the miracle had not brought the general the glow of youth.
But it put elasticity into him. The eventful year had given him a
shaking up, and his veins pulsed with the joy of life and the energy for
work of a man in his prime. It was as a sovereign that he sat there in
the shadow of the plane-trees, with good fortune sparkling on his chest
and a city lying at his feet. Nothing, not a single thing, was lacking
to make the fairy tale perfect.

In front of the coffee-house, guarded by two sturdy corporals, rested
the great grey beast, with the lungs of a hundred horses in its chest,
awaiting the cranking-up to rush its master off to his castle high above
town and valley. Where were the days when, with his general's stripes on