This time the young wife had gone with him as far as Tours, to be with him a few hours longer and after that to receive his letters more promptly. How long the time had seemed, all alone in the Hôtel de l'Univers! And yet she had a pretty room! She had amused herself with piquing public curiosity on the Rue Nationale, with her little walking-suit of the latest cut, and her simple canoe hat—quite the "Parisienne on a holiday"—and the elegance of her manners, at once independent and circumspect, as were all her ways. It was generally agreed that she was pretty. Who was not asking questions about her in the hotel, at the restaurant? It had amused her to see a family of tourists inventing pretexts for changing places at their small table, this one in order to face her, that one in order that the grown-up son might not face her. And how they had stared at her!
Telegrams had come from the sublieutenant. "Be at Pont-de-Piles to-morrow, darling," or "Ligueil, such a day for lunch," or "Loches, Hôtel de France, after breaking up." And she had sometimes waited a long while in wayside inns or beside dusty highways.
Conversations at table began to come back to her. Every one had been talking of the manœuvres, discussing the names of generals, the communes that were being occupied. The presence of the President of the Republic was an event in the countryside. There had been old men who would consent to speak of nothing nearer than 1870; others, of fewer years, would recall the magnificent condition of the reconstituted army at the time of Gambetta's death, or at the period of the Schnaebele affair, when the country was so near to seeing it in action. A politician of the neighborhood—not more stupid, after all, than most of his contemporaries—rubicund, his eyes bloodshot at the end of dinner, had fallen foul of all these memories, regrets, would-be warlike emotions, and turned them upside down like eggs in a frying-pan. According to him, war was the scourge of bygone ages. France, the nation of progress, still consented to carry on a semblance of it, by way of facilitating necessary transitions, but it was a mere play of protocols, a final concession to the past. War was destructive; modern society was interested wholly in production; to believe in war was to turn back the clock of history. For that matter, every well-informed person was aware that scientific means of destruction had become such that a fratricidal conflict had been rendered impossible, im-pos-si-ble! One must be an idiot not to perceive that everything would be reduced to fragments in the twinkling of an eye. The manœuvres! ah, you made him laugh with your manœuvres! The manœuvres were no more like war than a toy pistol was like a German mortar. War, should it ever break out, would not last the time it would take to concentrate your army corps; the first of two adversaries who should be half a day ahead would bring the other to cry mercy.
"Well, say," some one had interrupted, "it wouldn't be a bad plan, then, to do one's best to get that half-day's advance?"
"Useless! Count your population, consider your aspirations. Think of the finances. Finances! There is not a country of great armaments that could maintain war for six weeks, nor one that could even endure three years' preparation for war.... Ask the great banks, which have the world in leading-strings, emperors and kings as well as peoples; don't deceive yourselves; war is impossible, im-pos-si-ble! We are witnessing, with your manœuvres, the final deeds of a prehistoric age.... Turn your eyes to the future, gentlemen, and all this bedizened and vociferous gang will seem to you like children's toys!"
"But Germany—the militant party—the Pangermanists?"
"Germany is a pacific nation, industrial and commercial, which uses its cannon as an advertising dodge. What we lack—don't you know?—is precisely business sense. And Germany has business sense. The military party? A drop of water in a lake. The Pangermanists? Advertising men in the pay of the national industry. In the first place, the Emperor, as every one says who has seen him near at hand, is a secret friend of France ... and I will add, the most republican of us all. Socialism, that's his enemy! ... The army that we need is not a rabble of soldiers, but a group of men bent upon keeping the peace. Humanity is on the march—it can never be repeated too often—toward a future of liberty, equality, fraternity. Ah, you must reckon with economic rivalry; that is the law of life."
"Precisely so."
Memory, quickened no doubt by her feverish condition, brought back to the young wife with extraordinary precision, even to the least of them, these utterances overheard at her solitary little table. True, she had amused herself with repeating them to the sublieutenant, her husband—she even recalled the moment—he was splashing in his bath, soaping himself, on his return from the manœuvres. He had laughed with all his heart, for when Jean had come back from the manœuvres he was another man from what he had been when going to them. Only a few days of presence with the corps, among his military comrades, had transformed him or, more correctly, had restored him to his normal disposition; or, in any case, had made him victor over the indolence with which he usually replied to the fine talkers of Paris.
As for Odette, she had attached not the slightest importance to any of these ideas, by whomever enunciated. Brought up in the one religion of happiness, she held that happiness through love was the sole boon to be asked of fate. What was the use of arguing? Why think about calamity? Did not certain of her friends, those most reputed for intelligence, insist that it was the honor of civilized man not even to think of acts of barbarism, that man raised himself in dignity as he neglected to prepare himself to make use of arms? Among many other sayings the oft-repeated, if somewhat cynical, pronouncement of M. de la Villaumer came back to her: "We are not in a condition to make war. We are unaware how far we are not in a condition to make war, because we do not in the least know what war is. If war is made upon us, as there is reason to fear—as well the deluge."