Major Graf Von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant, was reading his newspaper as he lay back in a great easy-chair, with his booted feet on the beautiful marble mantelpiece where his spurs had made two holes, which had grown deeper every day during the three months that he had been in the chateau¹ of Uville.

 

A cup of coffee was smoking on a small inlaid table, which was stained with liqueur, burned by cigars, notched² by the penknife of the victorious³ officer, who occasionally would stop while sharpening a pencil, to jot⁴ down figures, or to make a drawing on it, just as it took his fancy.

 

When he had read his letters and the German newspapers, which his orderly had brought him, he got up, and after throwing three or four enormous pieces of green wood on the fire, for these gentlemen were gradually cutting down the park in order to keep themselves warm, he went to the window. The rain was descending⁵ in torrents⁶, a regular Normandy rain, which looked as if it were being poured out by some furious person, a slanting⁸ rain, opaque⁹ as a curtain, which formed a kind of wall with diagonal stripes, and which deluged¹⁰ everything, a rain such as one frequently experiences in the neighborhood of Rouen, which is the watering-pot of France.

 

For a long time the officer looked at the sodden¹¹ turf and at the swollen¹² Andelle beyond it, which was

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