A few words from Jeannine—a supplementary card, that one—were what reassured us, before all the papers. An aide-de-camp from Foch had just been dining with them, and had given them details. The situation had been critical, desperate, one day, but it had been tardily re-established the next day, and was now consolidated, and no longer gave any cause for alarm.
I read the whole passage to my father. He gave a sigh of relief.
"We are saved, then! The source of your information seems reliable. Is it one of your friends, who's written to you?"
"A friend, yes."
Later on, quite soon, it would be sweet to open my heart to him, to claim his blessing on the daughter I should bring him.
The Landrys had again put off the date of their departure. Jeannine gave me to understand, with a certain emphasis, that some business matters could not be settled. I had the delicacy never to ask for details.
This delay suited me very well. I would have given a lot for them not to join us before the ghastly "stump" had been relegated to the rubbish heap. Jeannine had, perhaps, guessed as much.
Oh! our correspondence at that point. I cannot prevent myself from returning to the subject. Its tone of complete confidence, of youthful abandonment. Oh! my loving beloved; arrayed in every attraction, who did not intoxicate me solely by the enchantment of her clear life and warm seduction, nor solely by the goodness which all her being irradiated. She was the intellectual companion, too—the complement, for which man's instinct yearns, and which he discovers so rarely.
Sometimes, after having come into collision with my father who could not be shaken in his opinions, I would turn to her in delight and admire her broader outlook. For instance, he did not desire, or even admit, the possibility of peace or a truce before the enemy had been completely crushed. According to him, the necessary conditions of the future Treaty were that the Central Powers should be dismembered; large territories annexed; and our frontier extended as far as the Rhine. The brutal law of force. The vanquished must bow his head. While, as for her it must be noted that she cursed the cruel blindness of the Teuton caste which provoked the catastrophe just as much as I did. But she followed me—far better than that—she boldly out-stripped me in my desire simply for the repression of a minor race, in my wish for the future re-establishment of concord among all nations, not excepting even that one. Did she not want to convince me that each great race in turn let itself be ensnared by the mirage of universal hegemony. Look at us, under Napoleon! In fifty or a hundred years, we should see these Germans rallied to our republican wisdom.
What joy I experienced in playing lightly upon all the chords of this young soul, in hearing each one of them vibrate in harmony with me.