"Surely," interrupted the little boy, "it was not the water that killed Madame Pigeon."
"How peaceful she looks," said the old man. "You would say the stone face of a saint from the façade of a cathedral."
"It may be," said Jeanne Bergère, "that already God has opened His mind to her, and that she knows of that vengeance, which we with our small minds are not able to invent."
"I can only think of what they have done to us," said the old man. "It does not seem as if there was anything left for us to do to them. Vengeance which does not give the Avenger pleasure is a poor sort of vengeance. Madame Simon…"
The old woman in question turned a pair of sheeny eyes towards the speaker.
"Would it give you any particular pleasure to cut the breasts off an old German woman?"
With a trembling hand Madame Simon flattened the bosom of her dress to show that there was nothing beneath.
"It would give me no pleasure," she said, "but I shall show my scars to the President."
"An eye for an eye—a tooth for a tooth," said the old man. "That is the ancient law. But it does not work. There is no justice in exchanging a German eye and a French. French eyes see beauty in everything. To the German eye the sense of beauty has been denied. You cannot compare a beast and a man. In the old days, when there were wolves, it was the custom of the naive people of those days to torture a wolf if they caught one. They put him to death with the same refinements which were requisitioned for human criminals. This meant nothing to the wolf. The mere fact that he had been caught was what tortured him. And so I think it will be with the Germans when they find that they have failed. They have built up their power on the absurd hypothesis that they are men. Their punishment will be in discovering that they never were anything but low animals and never could be."
"That is too deep for me," said the other man. "They tied my daughter to her bed, and afterward they set fire to her mattress."