It was fearlessly said in the presence of the children. Not one of the little ones showed the least emotion, while Odette shuddered through her whole body. She asked after the mother.
"Mama writes that the mortars send a regular hail; she is almost deafened with them. The noise disturbs her in her work. They jump, at times, as over a skipping-rope, she writes.... She has also some Boches to wait upon her; did you know?"
And that was all. Odette looked at the dead man's portrait, opposite that of the Red Cross nurse, who was jumping, at this moment, at the sound of the marmites, and had just sent her young son to the firing-line, casting at least one more de Blauve into the furnace that had consumed his father. Monsieur de Blauve had not been painted in uniform; he showed only the good face of a clever and kindly man. It must have been in all tranquillity, without uttering a single grand word, that he had prepared his whole family for the eventualities of war; and his children, to the last one, were as ready to die as to go on a walk, or to church.
[IV]
Odette went away disconcerted. Not a word had been said about her Jean, who also had died heroically. But what had they said about the other hero, Commandant de Blauve, whose death had brought her there? Men disappear; they are replaced; a memory of them remains, which is henceforth called "honor," and which does not admit of emotion. That was precisely what certain of her friends had already said to her. They had seemed to know that in advance, but Odette—no. She thought, as she returned home, of that bloody sunset over the sea, upon which she had gazed at Surville on August I, and during which she had had the impression that she was entering a new world.
She found three letters in the vestibule; one, belated, from a friend in the country, who had only just heard of the death of Lieutenant Jacquelin, and who "complimented" her, basing her consolation upon "the honor with which she saw her adorned." The others were from strangers charged to announce to her that the husband of a friend who lived in Versailles, and that of another in Bourg-la-Reine, had just been killed.
Odette sank down upon the divan, her head feeling bruised as if she had bumped it against the wall; killed, killed—then there were dead men everywhere? And she felt a dark rancor toward all those fatal events that fell upon her so furiously to disturb her grief, her personal grief.
She saw again those three men of whose loss she had been told that very day—in a single half-day—Commandant de Blauve, a magnificent man, a man without a blot, "a type of Plutarch" as he had been called, always with the added words, "characters such as his were no longer made"; then Jacques Graveur, him of Versailles, a good comrade of Jean's, one who never made an ado about anything, and passed for none too serious; it appeared that he had saved his whole company by coolness and the sacrifice of himself; Louis Silvain, he of Bourg-la-Reine, had brought his captain in upon his shoulders, across two hundred metres of open ground under a hail of grape-shot, had come within three metres of his trench, when a ball passed through his body—but the officer was saved. He had been, in ordinary life, a big fellow, with no other occupation than to haunt the theatres, play at the races, and drink cocktails at the bars.... Such different figures, suddenly united in a similar act, for which some of them had from all time been prepared, the others not at all—the strangeness, the incomprehensibility of it all!
She must write letters of condolence—she, who had received so many! While she was writing to the others she was thinking especially of her Jean; she felt a certain fascination in writing of grief; she dwelt upon it too much at length; it would be apparent to the wives to whom she wrote that she was thinking only of herself.... But each of them would have done the same, and would forgive her.
All through the day the memory of Jean shook off from her the haunting thought of the three other dead men. She consulted a map of the Touring Club of which she had sometimes made use with her husband in their automobile drives. The spot where Jean had fallen was not far from a highway over which they had often driven. "Perhaps I saw one day the very spot where his body is lying to-day...." Then followed endless despairing reveries. How had she not foreseen the possibility of the event—of the war, at least? Yet war had often been discussed in her presence, at the time of the alarms of Agadir, of Casablanca, even of Tangier, when she was a young girl. Then things were possible, things which perhaps might happen to-morrow, of which people were talking to-day, and to which her mind had been hermetically closed? War, war! She used to know old people who talked about it; yes, because they had seen it. And they were tiresome. Young people didn't believe in such things. She tried to excuse herself; then she pronounced herself guilty. Why had they usually avoided people who talked of serious things? And why had they considered as clever those who ridiculed everything? Suddenly she thought of "Monsieur's linen," "Monsieur's wardrobe," of all those belongings of his which would never again be used, never.... Should she go on leaving them all in their places? Should she do away with them? Or should she put them all away in a closet, a reliquary?