To-day I have been seeing the little old curé of Jadis-sur-Marne. I found out, after all this time, where he was; and went and sat with him for an hour, in a pleasant sunny room of the house where they take care of him. He did not know me at first, but afterwards he seemed quite pleased. I want to tell this story of him.
One Sunday, months and months and ages and ages and ages ago, Monsieur le Curé of Jadis-sur-Marne, began his discourse in a wrath righteous indeed. It was the Sunday that nobody knew was to be the last Sunday of peace.
"My dear brethren," began Monsieur le Curé, in his most angry voice. He snapped the words out, "Mes chers frères," as if each word were a little sharp stone shot out of a sling to sting the upturned faces of his listeners. "My dear brethren," he began in righteous wrath, and stopped short.
He stood in a bar of dust and sun motes, up in the old black carved pulpit, against the grey stone pillar. Then he was a round, jolly, rosy, busy old little curé, who got into a temper only reluctantly, after much goading.
His church was old and beautiful and quite large. There were twenty-one people in it: ten in the château chapel, opposite the pulpit, Madame la Marquise and Mademoiselle and two guests in the great red-velvet chairs, and six of the servants in the benches behind them; old Ernestine, the curé's bonne, in her round white cap, erect, determined to stop awake; another white cap or two, here and there, and Père Pate's black skull-cap; two secularized sisters from the Ecole Libre, awkward in their black hats and jackets; three little wriggling girls whom they had managed to capture and retain on the bench between them; some small boys down by the door; and Madelon, the twelve-year-old daughter of the château gardener, who forsook the château pew that she might sit nearer to Monsieur le Curé.
Madelon sat twisted round in her chair to look straight up at him and adore, her hands in their Sunday gloves clasped intensely upon her blueprint lap.
It was cool in the church after the last day's rain, and dark, except where bars of sunshine and dancing sun motes struck across, and where the altar candles were little stars.
One heard the chickens cackling in the curé's garden, and the locusts shrilling close at the windows in the acacia trees of the cemetery, and the children calling and laughing in the street.
"My dear brothers," began Monsieur le Curé, looking down into the round blue eyes of Madelon.