It was September, and around Viger the harvest was nearly finished. The days were clear as glass; already the maples were stroked with fire, with the lustre of wine and gold; early risers felt the keener air; the sunsets reddened the mists which lay light as lawn on the low fields. But Paul Arbique thought and spoke of Sedan alone, the place where he was born, of the Meuse, the bridges, of his father’s farm, just without the walls of the city, and of his boyhood, and the friends of his youth. His thoughts were hardly of the war, or of the terror of the downfall which had a little while before so haunted him.
It was the evening of the day upon which the news of the battle had come. They had resolved not to tell him, but there was something in Latulipe’s manner which disturbed him. Waking from a light doze, he said: “That Prussian spy, what did he say?—they must fight there—between Mézières and Carignan? I have been at Carignan—and he had his hound’s paw on Sedan.” He was quiet for a while; then he said, dreamily: “They—have—fought.” Latulipe, who was watching with him, wept. In the night his lips moved again. “France,” he murmured, “France will rise—again.” It was toward the morning of the next day when his true heart failed. Latulipe had just opened the blinds. A pale light came through the willows. When she bent over him she caught his last word. “Sedan.” He sighed. “Sedan.”
NO. 68 RUE ALFRED DE MUSSET.
IT was an evening early in May. The maples were covered with their little seed-pods, like the crescents of the Moslem hosts they hung redly in the evening air. The new leaf-tips of the poplars shone out like silver blooms. The mountain-ash-trees stood with their virginal branches outlined against the filmy rose and gray of the evening sky, their slender leaves half open. Everything swam in the hazy light; the air was full of gold motes; in the sky lay a few strands of cloud, touched with almost imperceptible rose. At the upper window of a house in De Musset Street, Maurice Ruelle looked down upon the trees covered with the misty light. His window was high above everything, and the house itself stood alone on the brow of a little cliff that commanded miles of broken country. Maurice was propped up at the window, and had a shawl thrown about his shoulders. The room was close; a little wood-fire was dying away in the open stove.
“Maurice, Maurice, I’m sick of life. I will be an adventuress.”
Maurice turned his head to look at the speaker. She was seated on the floor, leaning on her slanted arm, which was thrown behind her to support her weight.
“Well, my dear sister, you are ambitious—”
“Don’t be bitter, Maurice.”
“I’m not bitter; I know you are ambitious; I am proud of you, you know. I don’t see why you have to nurse me; fate is cruel to you.”