And mademoiselle did not speak again. She was essentially a woman of her word. She had undertaken to find Lory and give him that odd, inexplicable message from the abbé. She had not undertaken much in her narrow life; but she had usually accomplished, in a quiet, mouse-like way, that to which she set her hand. And now, as she drove through the smiling country, with which it was almost impossible to associate the idea of war, she was planning how she could get to the front and work there under the Baron de Mélide, and find Lory de Vasselot.
“They are somewhere near a little place called Sedan,” said the baroness.
And Mademoiselle Brun set out that same day for the little place called Sedan; then known vaguely as a fortress on the Belgian frontier, and now for ever written in every Frenchman's heart as the scene of one of those stupendous catastrophes to which France seems liable, and from which she alone has the power of recovery. For, whatever the history of the French may be, it has never been dull reading, and she has shown the whole world that one may carry a brave and a light heart out of the deepest tragedy.
By day and night Mademoiselle Brun, sitting upright in a dark corner of a second-class carriage, made her way northward across France. No one questioned her, and she asked no one's help. A silent little old woman assuredly attracts less attention to her comings and goings than any other human being. And on the third day mademoiselle actually reached Chalons, which many a more important traveller might at this time have failed to do. She found the town in confusion, the civilians bewildered, the soldiers sullen. No one knew what an hour might bring forth. It was not even known who was in command. The emperor was somewhere near, but no one knew where. General officers were seeking their army-corps. Private soldiers were wandering in the streets seeking food and quarters. The railway station was blocked with stores which had been hastily discharged from trucks wanted elsewhere. And it was no one's business to distribute the stores.
Mademoiselle Brun wandered from shop to shop, gathering a hundred rumours but no information. “The emperor is dying—Macmahon is wounded,” a butcher told her, as he mechanically sharpened his knife at her approach, though he had not as much as a bone in his shop to sell her.
She stopped a cuirassier riding a lame horse, his own leg hastily bandaged with a piece of coloured calico.
“What regiment?” she asked.
“I have no regiment. There is nothing left. You see in me the colonel, and the majors, and the captains. I am the regiment,” he answered with a laugh that made mademoiselle bite her steady lip.
“Where are you going?”
“I don't know. Can you give me a little money?”