His brother laughed, and called him a great stupid. But he repeated: “You would be killed, I know you would.”

On that day, Julien, excited, and jeered at by us, spoke his mind. He thought the soldiers[Pg 149] horrid, he did not see what there was in them to attract us. It was all the soldiers’ fault, because if there were not any soldiers, there would not be any fighting. In fact, he hated war; it terrified him, and, later on, he would find some way to prevent his brother from going. It was a sort of morbid, unconquerable aversion which he felt.

[Pg 149]

Weeks and months went by. We had got tired of the regiments; we had found out another sport, which was to go fishing, of a morning, for the little fresh-water fish, and to eat what we caught in a third-rate tavern. The water was icy. Julien got a cold on the chest, of which he nearly died. In college, war was no longer talked about. We had fallen back deeper than ever into Homer and Virgil. All at once, we learned that the French had conquered, which seemed to us quite natural. Then, regiments again began to pass, but in the other direction. They no longer interested us; still, we did see two or three. They did not seem to us so fine, diminished as they were by[Pg 150] half—and the rest is lost in a mist. Such was the Crimean war, in France, for schoolboys shut up in a country college.

[Pg 150]

II.

In 1859 I was in Paris, finishing my studies at the Lycée St. Louis. As it happened, I was there with my two school-fellows from Aix, Louis and Julien. Louis was preparing for his entrance examination to the Ecole Polytechnique; Julien had decided to go in for law. We were all out-students.

By this time we had ceased to be savages, entirely ignorant of the contemporary world. Paris had ripened us. Thus, when the war with Italy broke out, we were abreast of the stream of political events which had led to it. We even discussed the war in the character of politicians and military adepts. It was the fashion at college to take interest in the campaign, and to follow the movements of the troops[Pg 151] on the map. During our college hours we used to mark our positions with pins and fight and lose battles. In order to be well up to date, we devoured an enormous supply of newspapers. It was the mission of us out-students to bring them in. We used to arrive with our pockets stuffed, with thicknesses of paper under our coats, enclosed from head to foot in an armour of newspapers. And while 

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