His heart beat, but not like d’Artagnan’s with a young and impatient love. No; a more material interest stirred his blood. He was about at last to pass that mysterious threshold, to climb those unknown stairs by which, one by one, the old crowns of M. Coquenard had ascended. He was about to see in reality a certain coffer of which he had twenty times beheld the image in his dreams⁠—a coffer long and deep, locked, bolted, fastened in the wall; a coffer of which he had so often heard, and which the hands⁠—a little wrinkled, it is true, but still not without elegance⁠—of the procurator’s wife were about to open to his admiring looks.

And then he⁠—a wanderer on the earth, a man without fortune, a man without family, a soldier accustomed to inns, cabarets, taverns, and restaurants, a lover of wine forced to depend upon chance treats⁠—was about to partake of family meals, to enjoy the pleasures of a comfortable establishment, and to give himself up to those little attentions which “the harder one is, the more they please,” as old soldiers say.