"Well, Jean-Claude, you are back again."
"Yes, Catherine. There is both good and bad news."
They went into the inner room, a high and spacious apartment, wainscoted to the very ceiling, with its cupboards of old oak with bright locks, its porcelain stove, its old clock marking the seconds in its walnut case, and its large arm-chair of embossed leather, which had been in use for ten generations. Jean-Claude never went into this room without thinking of Catherine's grandfather, whom he seemed still to see sitting in the shadow behind the stove.
"Well!" inquired the farm-mistress, offering a seat to the sabot-maker, who had just placed his bundle on the table.
"Well, of Gaspard, the news is good; the lad is well. He has seen some hardships—so much the better; that is the making of a young man; but for the rest, Catherine, everything is very bad. War! war!"
He shook his head, and the old woman, with compressed lips, sat opposite to him, upright in her arm-chair, her eyes fixed, and listening eagerly.
"So everything is going wrong; we shall have wars at our very doors?"
"Yes, Catherine, from one day to the next we may expect to see the Allies in our mountains."
"I dreaded as much. I was sure of it; but speak, Jean-Claude."
Hullin then, with his elbows on his knees, his great red ears between his hands, and lowering his voice, began to relate all that he had seen: the defences round the town, the formation of batteries on the ramparts, the publication of the state of siege, the carts filled with the wounded in front of the church, his meeting with the old sergeant at the house of Wittman, and the renewal of the campaign. From time to time he made a pause, and the old farm-mistress would slowly wink her eyes, as though to fix the facts in her memory. When Jean-Claude came to the wounded, the good woman murmured, in a low voice, "Gaspard has escaped that."