Bourmont, January 14.
Madame is sick and I am worried. It isn’t so much that she is dangerously ill as that she is dangerously old. She lies in the big blue room upstairs, looking like a patient aged Madonna, without a fire, and with no one to look after her. Monsieur it seems has made up his mind to her demise and piously resigned himself. I called in an army doctor.
“She’s pretty low,” he said, “but it isn’t medicine she needs so much as nursing.”
I informed Monsieur. He must get a woman to come in and take care of her. But there was no such woman. He must try to find one. But no, it was impossible! “Well at least, you can make a fire in her room,” I told him. As for La Petite, she has proved herself a broken reed. Lacking Madame’s rigid eyes upon her, she has become lazy and negligent. Moreover she is indubitably in love with some doughty doughboy, the proof being that she spends the time when she should be gathering the harvest of dust from the Salle des Assiettes in copying English phrases from our books on to the Gendarme’s pink blotting-paper. Yesterday we found “Welcome Americans” scrawled all over it. Meanwhile Monsieur seems to consider himself as qualifying for a martyr’s crown because he gets his own meals and washes his own dishes. “Mais, regardez Mademoiselle!” he calls to me as I pass through the living-room, and flourishes the dish-cloth at me with a tragic air. So between excursions to the canteen I am trying to play nurse to Madame, and a pretty poor one I make, I fear. Worse still, I must act as interpreter for the Doctor, whose French is absolutely nil, at every visit and since my scanty stock of French phrases hardly includes a sick-room vocabulary I am often absolutely at a loss. But we muddle through somehow and the Doctor gets his reward when we stop to speak to Monsieur in the front-room afterwards, for then Monsieur must bring out a bottle of champagne and together they sit in front of the fire and toast each other.
Yesterday the Doctor prescribed fresh eggs. I told Monsieur. But there were none in Bourmont he declared.
“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll get them.”
I started out to search. I knew of course that eggs in France these days were difficult. In some places the Americans have been forbidden, on account of the scarcity, to buy either eggs or chickens; a ruling which officers have been known to evade by the simple expedient of renting laying hens. But no such prohibition exists at present in Saint Thiebault. Just the other day a lad told me he had consumed twelve fried eggs at one sitting.
“Yes and Corporal G. ate more than I did.”
“How many did he eat?”
“Oh, just thirteen.”