As they insisted, we begged the policeman who had made this inconvenient request to come with us to the hôtel des Trois-Pucelles, where we always stopped on our visits to Soissons; there, the proprietor would answer for us.
We had also a distant cousin living in the town, a baker, whose name I have totally forgotten.
But he lived in the opposite suburb to that through which we had entered, while the hôtel des Trois-Pucelles was only a hundred steps away.
The policeman made no difficulty about accompanying us there.
As my mother expected, when we got there, the host burst out laughing in the policeman's face: he made himself answerable for us, and there the matter ended.
We asked for a room and dinner; and, although my mother had taken nothing all day but a cup of coffee, she ate very little; she was evidently greatly preoccupied.
After dinner, she sent for our host and asked him news of the prisoners.
It will easily be believed that they were the topic of the hour, and there was probably not a house throughout the town where a similar conversation to ours was not being held at that moment.
The arrival of the three carriages and their escort had made as great a sensation as it had in Villers-Cotterets; with this difference, however, that Soissons, instead of being Royalist like the county town, was Bonapartist.
This was not to be wondered at, for Soissons, being a fortified town, took its political opinions from the army.