The table had a red-and-white cloth.
The little old thin brown woman who served us wanted to talk all the time with us. She wanted to talk about the omelet; she had made it and was very proud of it. She wanted to talk about the war and to talk about her son.
She said that there had been some horrible, strange mistake and that people thought that he was dead. She had had a paper from the Ministry of War telling her he was dead. It was very strange. She had had a letter also from the Aumonier, telling her he was dead. But, of course, she knew.
She said he would come home, and be so sorry she had had such dreadful news, and so glad that she had not believed it.
They would laugh together. He had beautiful white teeth, she said, and his eyes screwed tight up when he laughed.
She told us how she and he would laugh together.
Gentilhommière
The road, up through the vineyards and pastures and fields of maize and of buckwheat, was like the bed of a mountain torrent, all tossed down, and grey and stony, between the poplars. In other years it had been a well enough kept little road, but in this year there was no one to care for it. And surely it had been a mountain torrent, in the spring's last melting of snows and in the heavy rains of the summer. Who was there left to mend it? Or who, indeed, to travel it?
We climbed it slowly in the golden autumn afternoon.