"Sebastien," I said, "you will live, and very soon, O! very soon, I will take you to St. Choiseul, and you shall stay with us. Is it well?"
He murmured; "Ah, Alfred. How surely you know it is well."
"Sebastien, you must not talk any more. You see what I hope to do. At the most two or three days and you will be with Dora." His eyes were bright with joy, and then almost as quickly they darkened with tears.
"No! No!" I remonstrated, "No! Sebastien—you need have no fears. The doctor says you will be quite the same, a strong, well man. Eh! Do you hear me? And see, this is what Dora has sent to you. All made by her own hands. Are you not content?"
I unfolded the roll of stockings, and handkerchiefs, and mittens, and waist bands, and as I handed them to feel he touched them with his lips, as though they were holy—indeed to him they were most holy—and then his lips moved too in prayer and a look unutterably tender flushed his face. His great liquid eyes closed, and his heart was consecrated anew to the pretty orphan girl.
Ah! those were terrible days. The shocking Teuton never faltered. He came on with big weltering blows that beat the French and English back, though we kept in good order, and, as the bulletin gave it, "The dam still holds, and breaches are being repaired." The government thought it best to leave Paris, and re-establish itself in Bordeaux, and the people thronged east and south from Paris to Tours, Orleans, Le Mons, Biarritz, Brest, Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, going in all ways, and blocking the roads so that nothing could move, and the men and women slept in the carriages, and wagons, and motor-cars, and in the roadside houses, and in the fields.
And the peasants north of Paris, in the farms and gardens, left in terror, and about fifteen hundred of them entered Paris—trudged the whole way—with boxes, and bags, bundles, strings of poultry, and sometimes driving their cows and pulling their pigs, with provisions tied up in shawls, and utterly dumb with grief and consternation.
Then the flying men appeared over Paris and dropped bombs just to scare the populace, letting fall papers and threats with lying news of the Germans almost at the gates of the city, and enclosing scoffing invitations to surrender. The bombs were dropped in the Rue de Hanovre, the Rue du Mart, the Rue Colbert, the Rue de Londres, the Rue de la Condamine. But later our aviators paroled the skies, and garrisoned the air, and the frightful taubes came no more. But it was I think on September third (thirty-two days after the beginning of the war), that a daring show-man let out orchestra stalls at the "butte" of Montmartre on an arranged tribune, whence the big German dragons could be seen hideously humming above the city.
Il était un peu drôle, mais la plaisanterie est dans le fond de la nature française; n'est ce pas? But Père Grandin frowned, and called it une grande folie, and then repeated the lines from La Fontaine:
Le trépas vient tout guérir;
Mais ne bougeons d'ou nous sommes:
Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
C'est la devise des hommes.