With a bound her fevered memory overleaped several months of war. They had entered an atmosphere of fire; it was hard, but they endured it. Alsace: a breath of wild hope, penultimate moment of Old France; Belgium: enthusiasm first, horror afterward; alliances: prognostications, so-called assured, as to the "final result"; invasion: a march to the scaffold in which the condemned cling to a hope of the improbable; the Marne: the improbable realized, for which no one had dared to hope; the enemy grappled with and hurled back; the fall of Antwerp, of which so many folk, who will appear again in the end, insist that "it has not the least importance."
Odette had received letters from Jean. How could Jean be in such a fiery furnace? And how had she been able to endure the thought? But many things once believed impossible were beginning to be recognized as possible. Jean was enduring his fatigues, and everything in him was taking on a new character. She had found him not such as he had been on his return from the manœuvres, but a man exalted above himself, who seemed to have transcended his own height, however he might try to appear simply his usual charming self. She could divine his sufferings, and yet she felt him to be happy. Odette had even come to think: "How little he needs me!" She had returned to Paris that she might receive his letters more promptly. But he appeared no longer to have any notion of time. That was because he was no longer master of his time. Odette was always writing to him as to an isolated being, who could do with himself as he liked. Without intending it, he would reply to her letters as if he were one who had no individual existence, a man carried away by something greater than himself, something which alone counted. She had not yet been able to understand, and she had gently reproached Jean for neglecting her.
And yet Odette's perpetual anxiety had been gradually growing less; she was already gaining confidence. Jean had passed through so many dangers! She had begun to believe in a possible immunity. How many men had been in the midst of wars through all a long life, and yet had died in bed, surrounded by their families!
Then, suddenly, one fine morning in the second fortnight of September Odette, still in bed, had heard the door-bell at an hour when seldom any one came to the front door. Amelia, her own maid, who had answered the bell, had rushed, breathless, to her mistress:
"Madame! it is Madame de Prans who insists upon seeing Madame!"
From her bed Odette had called out: "Come in, Simone, come right in!"
Simone de Prans had brought tidings of Jean. She had received them from dear Pierrot, her husband, who had been sent to Paris for twenty-four hours on a mission.
Tidings of Jean? But, to begin with, they were satisfactory? How?—satisfactory? Well, she could say that they were not bad. But "not bad" is not good! No, but one must not exaggerate things. In short, half-admissions, denials, returns upon the question, openings left for hope, equivocal utterances, embarrassments of which Odette soon ceased to be the dupe. And she had had courage to say, suddenly:
"My little Simone, you dare not acknowledge that the greatest of calamities has befallen me."
It was at that moment of half-wakefulness during which all these previous events had passed before her memory, that Odette suddenly came broad awake. She uttered a great cry, and every one in the next room came running.