The first object that caught my eyes was a horse standing tethered in what had been the ruins of a barn adjoining the farmhouse. Creeping up to the door, which had been left ajar, I peeped in, and saw a party of French soldiers seated on the floor, eating bread and sausages, and drinking from little tin cans. My mouth watered at the sight of this food after more than twelve hours of fasting, but I was not conscious of this till afterwards. The party consisted of seven men. One, somewhat apart from the rest (it was he who had sat himself on the trap door), was clearly an officer. He was a tall, lean man of some forty years; he had unbuttoned his coat and laid his hat, in which there was a white cockade, beside him. At a respectful distance from him sat the others of the party.
For some time they ate their meal in silence, the men, I suppose, not daring to converse in the presence of their captain. But by and by the officer, his hunger being some whit appeased, unbent a little from his dignity and addressed a stout little sergeant among the party.
"It is twelve years since I was here before, Jules," he said, and there was a noticeable air of condescension in his tone; it was as though he did the sergeant a mighty favor in speaking at all.
"Yes, monsieur," said the sergeant, as if humbly inviting him to continue.
"Yes, twelve years ago," the officer repeated. "I have reason, truly, to know it again. Those were the days of the Conversions, Jules. You don't know what the Conversions were? I will tell you. There were cursed Huguenots in the country then, Jules, bad citizens, unruly rascals every one of them, and our good king commanded that they should instantly return to the true faith. Some of them were obstinate, and they, see you, had to be converted. We called it conversion by lodgings, and, my faith, it was excellent sport. They quartered some of us on any household that was unwilling to obey the king, and there we remained until they saw the error of their ways.
"My faith! some were hard to convert. The owner of this place, for instance. We were here for a month, and never lived better in our lives. The fool! He had a pretty daughter, too, and I fell in love with her. The farmer objected, and one day had the insolence to strike me. That was treason, of course, and the least we could do, especially as he was so obstinate in the matter of his conversion, was to burn his farm. He shot one of my men while we were at the work, and--well, we hanged him. That was twelve years ago."
The sergeant laughed. I, who had heard something from my father of King Lewis' treatment of his Huguenot subjects--of the Dragonnade, as it was called, and the sufferings of the poor people at the hands of the brutal soldiery--I, who knew of this, was shocked at the callous levity of the captain's speech; and I could have struck the fat, foolish face of the sergeant for his chuckle.
"What fools men are!" the captain went on. "Who would have supposed that these rascals of deserters would make for the very place where they would most readily be discovered! But all these peasants are simpletons. If you, now, were to desert, Jules, you would not return to Meaux, would you? You are a townsman, and have more sense. But these peasants--bah! cattle, no more."
I thought the sergeant's laugh at this rang a trifle hollow. He was not a soft-hearted man in appearance, but perhaps he had some fellow feeling for poor men dragged from their work at the plough to serve in the army of the Grand Monarque. His next words surprised me, for I had not understood the captain's reference to deserters.
"Shall we give them something to eat, mon capitaine?" he asked.