An Altar
From the narrow deep old street you turn in under an arch to a vaulted passage that is always dark and cold. It looks into a court that once was very proud. Now a wholesale wine merchant has heaped his tuns one upon another in one corner, and in another corner a carpenter has his saws and benches and great logs of mountain oak and pine. There are the smells of wine and fresh-cut wood together with the smell of stones and ages in the court.
The houses about the court still keep something of their "grand air." They are of all the colours that time in the south gives to stones, saffron and amber and gold, as if the stone were soft for the sunshine to sink into.
On the left of the court there is a wide high door under an escutcheon.
The sound of the bronze knocker is very stately.
The wine merchant has a blackbird that whistles all day in its osier cage, and the children of the carpenter are always laughing and calling, as they play with the fresh curled wood shavings.
But everybody seems to stop and listen when you lift the bronze knocker.
A lame man-servant comes to open the door. He fought through '70 with his master and was wounded at Sedan, where his master was killed.
There is a wide stone stairway, with a wrought-iron railing, and with walls discoloured where the tapestries have been taken away.
The tapestries are gone also from the corridor, and from the room to which the man-servant opens the door.
The old portraits are left in the walls of that room, and the exquisite wood-carving of the time of the Sun King, but the three or four chairs and the table on the right by the great carved hearth, are such as one would find at the Bazar of the Nouvelles Galeries.
The room is empty, except for these chairs and the table, and the little altar.
The long side of the room, opposite the door, has four tall windows that look across a garden, with untrimmed yew-trees and box edges, over green paths, tangles of grass and flowers, to what used to be conventual buildings and the nuns' orchard.
The little altar is at the end of the room on the left as you come in, facing the windows.
There is a statue of Notre Dame des Victoires and a statue of Saint Jeanne d'Arc, and there is the Cross between them. There are two seven-branched old bronze candlesticks. The altar is spread with "a fine white cloth."
On the floor before it is laid something covered with the flag of the Republic.
I know what it is that the flag covers.
She had showed it to me.
One day, I don't know why, she took me there and lifted the flag, and showed me a heap of toys.
She said, "They were babies when they died." "They died;" she said, "the two of them in one week together, of a fever. It was in the year that we called, till now, the 'Terrible Year.' It was in the month of the battle in which their father was killed." She said, "Look at the wooden soldiers of my babies, the Hussars and the Imperial Guards. How long ago! And this was a little model of the cannon of those days. Look at the bigger one's musket and the little one's trumpet and drum. And the little uniforms of the Empire I had made for them, and they were so proud of—My sons, to whom it was not given to die for France."