At the end of the road, in the fields on the slope, a beautiful eighteenth-century house stood behind a mossy green wall. It was just such a French house as is the analogue of our brick mansions of Georgian days; it was two stories high and had a great front room on each side of an entry on both floors, each room being lighted with two well-proportioned French windows. The outer walls were a golden brown, and the roof, which curved in gently from the four sides to central ridge, a very beautiful rich red. The house had the atmosphere of the era of the French Revolution; one's fancy could people it with soberly dressed provincial grandees. A pare of larches and hemlocks lay about it, concealing in their silent obscurity an artificial lake heavily coated with a pea-soup scum.
Beyond the house lay the deserted rose-garden, rank and grown to weeds. On some of the bushes were cankered, frozen buds. In the center of the garden, at the meeting-point of several paths, a mossy fountain was flowing into a greenish basin shaped like a seashell, and in this basin a poilu was washing his clothes. He was a man of thirty-eight or nine, big, muscular, out-of-doors looking; whistling, he washed his gray underclothes with the soap the army furnishes, wrung them, and tossed them over the rose-bushes to dry.
"Does anybody live in this house?"
"Yes, a squad of travailleurs."
A regiment of travailleurs is attached to every secteur of trenches. These soldiers, depending, I believe, on the Engineer Corps, are quartered just behind the lines, and go to them every day to put them in order, repair the roads, and do all the manual labor. Humble folk these, peasants, ditch-diggers, road-menders, and village carpenters. Those at Pont-à-Mousson were nearly all fathers of families, and it was one of the sights of the war most charged with true pathos to see these gray-haired men marching to the trenches with their shovels on their shoulders.
"Are you comfortable?"
"Oh, yes. We live very quietly. I, being a stonemason and a carpenter, stay behind and keep the house in repair. In summer we have our little vegetable gardens down behind those trees where the Boches can't see us."
"Can I see the house?"
"Surely; just wait till I have finished sousing these clothes."
The room on the ground floor to the left of the hallway was imposing in a stately Old-World way. The rooms in Wisteria Villa were rooms for personages from Zola; this room was inhabited by ghosts from the pages of Balzac. It was large, high, and square; the walls were hung with a golden scroll design printed on ancient yellow silk; the furniture was of some rich brown finish with streaks and lusters of bronzy yellow, and a glass chandelier, all spangles and teardrops of crystal, hung from a round golden panel in the ceiling. Over a severe Louis XVI mantel was a large oil portrait of Pius IX, and on the opposite wall a portrait head of a very beautiful young girl. Chestnut hair, parted in the fashion of the late sixties, formed a silky frame round an oval face, and the features were small and well proportioned. The most remarkable part of the countenance were the curiously level eyes. The calm, apart-from-the-world character of the expression in the eyes was in interesting contrast to the good-natured and somewhat childish look in the eyes of the old Pope.