The conversation was opened by the Norman farmer who offered to relieve the little old woman of her basket and set it safely between his feet.
"Oh, non merci," she piped in a thin little wavering treble, and an inimitable accent which made it impossible to guess her origin.
"Oh, no, Monsieur, thank you," she continued. "It's full of cream tarts and cherry tarts, and custard pies made right in our own home. I'm taking them to my boy, and as we stayed up very late to make them so that they would be quite fresh, I should hate to have any of them crushed or broken. He did love them so when he was little!"
"Our son was just the same. As soon as he was able to eat he begged them to let him have some brioche. But his fever was too high when we got there, and he couldn't take a thing. 'That doesn't matter,' he said to his mother. 'Just the sight of them makes my mouth water, and I feel better already.'"
My Provençal neighbour could no longer resist. His natural loquaciousness got the better of his reserve.
"Well, the first thing my son asked for was olives, so I brought him enough to last, as well as some sausage which he used to relish. Oh, if only I could bring him a little bit of our blue sky, I'm sure he would recover twice as quickly."
The mother of the young girl now sat forward and asked the Norman farmer's wife where and how her son had been wounded.
"He had a splinter of shell in his left thigh. He'd been through the whole campaign without a scratch or a day of illness."
The woman's eyes sparkled with pride and tenderness.
The short man beside me, who informed me he was a native of Beaucaire on the Rhone, had one son wounded and being cared for in a hospital at Caën, a second prisoner in Germany, and two sons-in-law already killed.