The colonel, sitting at the head of the table, under the portraits of generations of Rémy's people, glared up at her as she stood, very tall.
"You will do as I command you, madame," he said.
There seemed to be no escape. Desperately chancing it, she said, "But you will not stoop to command so idly. You know that we have no help but to obey you. Of what value could be forced obedience to you in so petty a thing? I know you will not command a thing so trivial and poor."
And he did not ask it of them.
Her days as well as Rémy's were crowded. The Germans required so many things, and there was no one left to serve them. She had only a few peasant servants to help her. The Germans demanded food, and there was scarcely anything to give them. Very little could be got in the emptied village; there was no more meat or bread. These people must eat, or they would become ugly. She must manage it somehow. She had to get the bakery started again, and make the villagers understand that they must give what they had in their little gardens, and their chickens and the rabbits. Old Jantot at the castle was quite unable to do the work of the kitchen-gardens and dairies. She worked hard helping him.
All the day of the arrival of the Germans she had been pitching hay from the stable loft to make bedding for the men quartered there; she scarcely left her work that day, except to go to the funeral of the soldier who had died in the Salle des Miroirs.
The curé helped old Jantot to carry him, and she followed them out through the courts, and past the German guard.
The two other wounded men in the Salle des Miroirs died while the strange alien life of the château went on. Three or four people of the village were ill; one woman and her newly born child died; there was no one but Claire to help the sage-femme.
The Germans accused the old curé of signalling from the church tower. They took him into the market-place, with a rope tied round his neck, to hang him, they said, under the plane-tree by the fountain. Rémy stood by him, risking everything to make them delay a few minutes.
Claire found the colonel; she never could remember what she said, how she pleaded. But the colonel said, "If we find these things true against him, then it will be your husband who will hang for it."