When evening came there was a grand dinner-party at M. Deviolaine's, to which I was taken; and the marshal took me up on his knees and fondled me: for he had known my father.
I asked him for news of my godfather Brune; he was in disgrace, or on the verge of it.
The dinner was a sad affair, the evening depressing. The marshal retired early, went to bed and slept. We were awakened at midnight by the sound of firing. Fighting was going on in the parterre. The marshal had been careless about his sentries; the enemy had seized his park, and he only saved himself by escaping, half-dressed, by a back-door, from M. Deviolaine's house.
In the morning the enemy had disappeared, taking away our dozen pieces of artillery.
The same day the marshal retired, I think, to Compiègne, and the town was deserted.
The enemy would surely not be long in appearing after this; so my mother set to work on a second haricot mutton.
Our days passed in constant alarms. When a couple of horsemen were seen on the highroad, the cry would go forth, "The Cossacks! the Cossacks!" Then a great crowd of people would run along the streets, children crying, shutters and doors banging as they fled, and the town would assume the funereal aspect of a city of the dead.
In spite of my mother's haricot mutton, which boiled unceasingly in the copper, and her Soissonais wine, ready for the corkscrew, she grew frightened with the rest, shut our door, and, pressing me to her breast, agitated and trembling, she would retire into a far corner.
Of course there were no more classes amid all these alarms; no more college; no more Abbé Grégoire.
I am wrong: the Abbé Grégoire was, on the contrary, more than ever present.