Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Neither is it well to walk and brood; yet here was I, foolish virgin that I was, brooding like a moulting hen. Taking myself firmly in hand, I turned down the rue de L'Étoile and opened the garden gate.

III

Madame was only a poor peasant woman, but she had once been very beautiful, and the old face was handsome still. The aquiline features are well-modelled, the large blue eyes clear and steady, flashing now with a fine pride, now with delicious humour; the head is well poised, she is essentially dignified; there are times when she has the air of a queen.

Her husband is tall and thin, with a drooping moustache, and in accordance with prevailing custom he keeps his hat on in the house, and he is seventy-two and she is seventy, and when I saw her first she was in her quaint little garden sitting under the shade of a mirabelle tree with an ancient dame to whom only Rembrandt could have done justice. Like Madame, she was short and broad, and without being handsome, she was just bonny. She had jolly little eyes and a chubby, dimpled face, and wore a spotlessly white and befrilled cap with strings that tied under her chin and made you rather want to kiss her. She was just a little coquette in her appearance, and she must have been born in prehistoric times, for she was "la tante de Madame Leblan." She didn't live in the little cottage, she had a room just across the way, and there I would see her sitting in the sun on a fine day as I turned in at the garden gate.

Of course we went down before her, and gave her of our best, for she was an irresistible old thing, who could coax you into cyclonic generosity. She would come trotting over to see us with a small basket on her arm, and having waited till the crowd that besieged our morning hours had melted away, would come upstairs looking so innocent and so picturesque our hearts were as water before her. And then out of the basket would come apples, or pears, or walnuts, with a honeyed phrase, the little vivid eyes searching our own. Refusal was out of the question, we were in the toils, knowing that for Madame we were the sun in the heavens, the down on the wings of the Angel of Life; knowing, too, that surely as she turned away would come the tactful hint, the murmured need. And though periodically we swore that she should have no more, she rarely went empty away.

At last, because of the equality of things, we hardened our hearts. She returned with walnuts. Our thanks being meticulously verbal, she retreated thoughtfully, to reappear a few days later with three pears and a remote malaise that successfully defied diagnosis. We knew she had her eyes on medical comforts, eggs, bons for meat, etc., so the malaise deceived no one, while a cold gift of aspirin tabloids nearly destroyed her faith in humanity.

And all the time she was "rich"! No wonder she was coquette, she could afford to be, for she had small rentes, and money laid by, and had saved all her papers and her bank-book. So Madame Leblan, who had left home with exactly twenty-seven francs in her pocket, told me, but not, loyally enough, until she was sure that our gifts to La Tante had ceased.

She herself never asked for anything, save once, and that was for a paletot for Monsieur. In spite of his three-score-years-and-twelve, in spite of the severe attack of internal hæmorrhage from which he was recovering, he went to work every morning at six, returning at six at night. Hard manual toil it was, too, much too hard for a man of his years. How Madame fretted over him! How she scraped and saved to buy him little comforts. And he did need that coat badly. I think I shall never forget her face when she saw the warm Cardigan jacket the Society provided for him. Her eyes filled with tears, she flushed like a girl, she looked radiantly beautiful and then, with the most gracious diffidence in the world, "You will permit me?" she said, and drew my face down to hers.

There was something about that old creature that made me feel ashamed. What one did was so pitifully little, but she made it seem like a gift of star-flowers bathed in the dews of heaven. It was her unconquerable sense of humour that attracted me to her, I suppose. French wit playing over the fields of life with an indomitable spirit that would not be broken.