"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!" said Cigarette, now grinding
her pretty teeth. She was in her most revolutionary and reckless mood,
drumming the rataplan with her spurred heels, and sitting smoking on the
corner of old Miou-Matou's mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired that
title among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat into
a stew so divine that you could not tell it from rabbit, being laid up
with a ball in his hip, a spear-head between his shoulders, a rib or so
broken, and one or two other little trifling casualties.
Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, laughed in the
depths of his great, hairy chest. "Dream of glory, and end on a grabat!
Just so, just so. And yet one has pleasures--to sweep off an Arbico's
neck nice and clean--swish!" and he described a circle with his lean,
brawny arm with as infinite a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, would
listen thirstily to the description of an exquisite bit of Faience or
Della Quercia work.
"Pleasures! My God! Infinite, endless misery!" murmured a man on her
right hand. He was not thirty years of age; with a delicate, dark,
beautiful head that might have passed as model to a painter for a St.
John. He was dying fast of the most terrible form of pulmonary maladies.
Cigarette flashed her bright, falcon glance over him.
"Well! is it not misery that is glory?"
"We think that it is when we are children. God help me!" murmured the
man who lay dying of lung-disease.
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