More cases than one are known where the lonely soldier has made a proposal, in form, to the fair débitante who nightly handed him his beer over the bar of a little Estaminet. Sometimes he has been accepted pour l’amour de sa cassette—sometimes “pour l’amour de ses beaux yeux!”
In a little hamlet several days’ march behind the firing-line, lived a widow. She was a grass-widow before Verdun, and there she became “veuve.” She was a tall, handsome woman, twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps, and her small feet and ankles, the proud carriage of her head, and the delicate aquiline nose bespoke her above the peasantry. She kept a little café at the junction of three cross-roads. The natives know her as Madame de Maupin.
Why “de” you ask? Because her father was a French count and her mother was a femme de chambre. The affair made an esclandre of some magnitude many years ago. Madame de Maupin was fille naturelle. She married, at the wishes of her old harridan of a mother, a labourer of the village. She despised her husband. He was uncouth and a peasant. In her the cloven hoof showed little. Despite no advantages of education she had the instincts of her aristocratic father. The natives disliked her for that reason.
Madame de Maupin kept a café. Until the soldiers came it did not pay, but she would not keep an Estaminet. It was so hopelessly “vulgaire.” After closing hours, between eight and ten, Madame de Maupin held her Court. Officers gathered in the little back room, and she entertained them, while they drank. She had wit, and she was very handsome. One of her little court, a young officer, fell in love with her. Her husband was dead.
Her lover had money, many acres, and position. He proposed to her. She loved him and—she refused him, “because,” she said simply, “you would not be happy.”
He was sent to the Somme.
Madame de Maupin closed her Estaminet and vanished.
There is a story told, which no one believes, of a woman, dressed in a private’s uniform of the British army, who was found, killed, among the ruins of Thiepval. She lay beside a wounded officer, who died of his wounds soon after. He had been tended by some one, for his wounds were dressed. In his tunic pocket was a woman’s photograph, but a piece of shrapnel had disfigured it beyond recognition.
But, as I said, no one believes the story.