BOBINET, if you please, Toni Bobinet, the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant of mountain artillery, attached to the garrison of Annecy (Haute Savoie), but at present on six weeks’ manoeuvres on the Needles (Les Aiguilles), from which on a clear day one can see in the west the lakes of Annecy and Geneva, and in the east the blunted ridge of the Bonne Montagne and the peaks of Mont Blanc—do you know your way about now? Well, then, Lieutenant Toni Bobinet sat on a boulder and tugged at his tiny moustache, first because he was bored, and secondly because he had read a newspaper two weeks old right through for the fifth time, and was now thinking things over.

At this point the chronicler ought to follow the meditations of the prospective Napoleon, but in the meantime his glance (the chronicler’s, that is) had slid along the snow-covered slopes to the gorge of the Arly, where the thaw had already set in, and where his eye is caught and held by the tiny little towns of Mégève, Flumet, and Ugines, with their pointed churches looking like toys. Ah, the memories of long-vanished childhood! The castles in the air one reared with one’s box of bricks!