"Franzosenkopf! What a strange character this nation has—who cannot accept their position as the conquered, and think themselves dishonoured if Germans make advances to them!"
"It is because they do nothing gratuitously," said Oberlé.
Farnow was not displeased at the word. It seemed to him a kind of homage to the hard, utilitarian temperamant of his race. Besides, the young lieutenant would not enter into a discussion where he knew that friendships ran the risk of being spoilt. He greeted a young woman, who came towards him, and followed her with his eyes.
"That is the wife of Captain von Holtzberg. Pretty, isn't she?"
Then pointing to the left, beyond the bridge to the quarters of the old city, illumined by the vaporous light of this spring morning, he added, as if the two thoughts were united naturally in his mind:
"I like this old-world Strasburg. How feudal it is!"
Above the river, whose waters were soiled by works and sewers, rose the long sloping roofs, with their high dormer windows, the tiles of all shades of red—the mediæval purple of Strasburg, mended, patched, and spotted, and washed, violet in places, nearly yellow in others adjoining, rose-colour on certain slopes, orange-coloured in some lights, royally beautiful everywhere and stretched out like a marvellous Eastern carpet of soft faded silks round the cathedral. The cathedral itself, built in red stone, viewed from this point, seemed to have been, and still to be, the pattern which had decided the colour of all the rest; it was the ornament, the glory, and the centre of all. A stork, with open wings, cleaving the air with wide strokes, as an oarsman cleaves water, his feet horizontally prolonging his body and acting as rudder, his bill a little raised like a prow, an heraldic bird, was flying through the blue, faithful to Strasburg, like all its ancient race, protected, sacred like the place, and always returning to the same nests above the same chimney stacks.
Jean and Farnow saw it inclining towards the cathedral spire, and seen from behind, foreshortened, it looked like some bird beating the air with its bow of feathers, and then it disappeared.
"These are the inhabitants," said Farnow, "whom neither the smoke of our factories, nor the tramways, nor the railways, nor the new palaces, nor the new order of things can astonish."
"They have always been German," said Jean with a smile. "The storks have always worn your colours—white belly, red bill, black wings."