Gentle as my murmur had been, M. le Curé was down on me like a shot. The woman who hesitates is lost. Anything is better than embarrassment. I repeated the question.
"Ce n'est pas nécessaire. Il y a un jardin," was his electrifying reply, and we filed out after him, with new ideas on French social questions simmering in our heads.
More embarrassing still, though, was a visit to a dear old couple living high up in a small room in a narrow fœtid street. Madame Legrand was a dear, with a round chubby face and the brightest of blue eyes, a complexion like a rosy apple and dimples like a girl's. She wore a spotlessly white mob-cap with a coquettish little frill round it, and she was just as clean and as fresh and as sonsy as if she had stepped out of her little cottage to go to Mass. Her husband was a rather picturesque creature, with a crimson cummerbund round his waist. He had been a garde-forêt, and together they had saved and scraped, living frugally and decently, putting money by every year until at last they were able to buy a cottage and an acre or two of land. Then the war came and the Germans, and the cottage was burnt, and the poor old things fled to Bar-le-Duc, homeless and beggared, possessed of nothing in all the world but just the clothes on their backs.
The garde-forêt was talking to my companion. I broached the all-important subject to Madame.
"Vous avez un seau hygiénique?" (I admit it was vilely put.)
"Mais oui, Mademoiselle. Voulez-vous ...?" Before I could stop her she had flourished it out upon the floor. It seems there are no limits to French hospitality, but there are to what even a commonplace English woman can face with stoical calm. Lest worse befall we fled. Somehow our sanitary researches lacked enthusiasm after that.
II
"Bar-le-Duc, an ancient and historical city of the Meuse, is beautifully situated on the banks of the Ornain."
That, of course, is how I should have commenced Chapter III, and then, with Baedekered solemnity, have described its streets, its canals, its railway-station—a dull affair until a bomb blew its glass roof to fragments; when it became quaintly skeletonic—its woods and hills, its churches and its monuments.