The news that Napoleon was in Vilna, hastily evacuated by the Russians in full retreat, came as a surprise and not to all as a pleasant one, in Dantzig.
It was Papa Barlasch who brought the tidings to the Frauengasse, one hot afternoon in July. He returned before his usual hour, and sent Lisa upstairs, with a message given in dumb show and interpreted by her into matter-of-fact German, that he must see the young ladies without delay. Far back in the great days of the monarchy, Papa Barlasch must have been a little child in a peasant's hut on those Cotes du Nord where they breed a race of Frenchmen startlingly similar to the hereditary foe across the Channel, where to this day the men kick off their sabots at the door and hold that an honest labourer has no business under a roof except in stocking-feet and shirt-sleeves.
Barlasch had never yet been upstairs in the Sebastians' house, and deemed it only respectful to the ladies to take off his boots on the mat, and prowl to the kitchen in coarse blue woollen stockings, carefully darned by himself, under the scornful immediate eye of Lisa.
He was in the kitchen when Mathilde and Desiree, in obedience to his command, came downstairs. The floor in one corner of the room was littered with his belongings; for he never used the table. “He takes up no more room than a cat,” Lisa once said of him. “I never fall over him.”
“She leaves her greasy plates here and there,” explained Barlasch in return. “One must think of one's self and one's uniform.”
He was in his stocking-feet with unbuttoned tunic when the two girls came to him.
“Ai, ai, ai,” he said, imitating with his two hands the galloping of a horse. “The Russians,” he explained confidentially.
“Has there been a battle?” asked Desiree.
And Barlasch answered “Pooh!” not without contempt for the female understanding.
“Then what is it?” she inquired. “You must remember we are not soldiers—we do not understand those manoeuvres—ai, ai, like that.”