"Because his father died during the occupation."
"And his mother?"
"She's dead too. No relations. The English adopted the boy. Towards the end of the war he was assistant-cook in a hospital at Bar-le-Duc, where I was a nurse. I adopted him."
The inspector uttered a grunt of approval and continued his examination.
"And Castor and Pollux."
"I don't know where they come from. In 1918, during the German push towards Châlons, they were caught in the storm and picked up on a road by some French soldiers who gave them their nicknames. The shock was so great that they've lost all memory of the years before those days. Are they brothers? Were they acquaintances? Where are their families? Nobody knows. I adopted them."
"Oh!" said the inspector, somewhat taken aback. Then he went on: "There remains now Sire Montfaucon, captain in the American army, decorated with the Croix de guerre."
"Present," said a voice.
Montfaucon drew himself stiffly upright in a soldierly attitude, his heels touching, and his little finger on the seam of his enormous trousers.
Dorothy caught him on to her knee and gave him a smacking kiss.