Assuredly, the most fertile imagination cannot conceive of felicity more complete than that of those two young lovers who, after a long wait, found themselves alone, far from jealous and curious eyes, ready to recount to each other at leisure their past sufferings, and to taste the delights of a perfect reunion. But the devil always finds means of pouring his drop of wormwood into the cup of happiness.

Johnson has written, but he was not the first, and he had taken it from a Greek, that no man can say to himself: ‘To-day I shall be happy.’ This truism, recognized at an epoch so far remote by the greatest philosophers, is still unknown to a certain number of mortals, and singularly unknown to the majority of lovers.

While they were having a pretty middling dinner in the blue room of several dishes purloined from the banquet of the Hussars and the Chasseurs, Leo and his lady had much to suffer from the conversation which was being kept up by those gentlemen in the next room. They were treating of subjects foreign to strategy and tactics—subjects which I shall take care not to recount.

It was a succession of bizarre stories, almost all of them very light, accompanied by bursts of laughter, in which it was sometimes rather difficult for our lovers not to take part. Leo’s lady was not a prude; but there are things that one does not like to hear, even tête-à-tête with the man that one loves. The situation was becoming more and more embarrassing and, as dessert was just about to be taken in to the officers, Leo thought he ought to go down to the kitchen, and beg the host to represent to these gentlemen that there was a lady ill in the room next to them, and that it was expected of their courtesy that they would be good enough to make a little less noise.

The proprietor, as usually happens during these corps dinners, was all in a flurry, and didn’t know whom to answer. At the same moment as Leo was giving his message for the officers, a waiter was asking champagne for the Hussars, and a maid-servant port wine for the Englishman.

‘I said there wasn’t any,’ she added.

‘You’re a fool. There are always all kinds of wine in my hotel: I’m going to find him some port! Bring me a bottle of ratafia, a bottle of cheap red wine, and a carafe of brandy.’

After he had manufactured the port in the twinkling of an eye, the host entered the big dining-room, and executed the commission which Leo had just charged him with. It excited first a furious tempest.

Then a bass voice which dominated all the others asked what sort of woman their neighbour was. A kind of silence ensued. The host answered:

‘Honour bright, gentlemen, I hardly know what to say. She is very nice and very shy. Mary Jane says she has a wedding ring on her finger. That might mean that she is a bride who has come here for her honeymoon, as happens sometimes.’

‘A bride?’ cried forty voices. ‘She must come and drink a toast with us! We’ll drink to her good health, and show her husband his conjugal duties!’

At these words a great noise of spurs was heard, and our lovers trembled, thinking that their room was going to be taken by assault. But suddenly a voice was raised which stopped the movement. It was obvious that it was a senior officer who was speaking. He reproached the officers for their want of manners, and gave them orders to sit down again, and to speak decently without shouting. Then he added some words too low to be heard in the blue room. They were listened to with deference, but not without exciting all the same a certain restrained hilarity. From that moment there reigned in the officers’ room a relative silence, and our lovers, blessing the salutary rule of discipline, began to speak to each other with more abandon. But, after such a disturbance, time was needed to recapture the tender emotions that inquietude, the annoyances of the journey, and above all, the loud joy of their neighbours, had seriously troubled. At