Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

When she was a girl her father used to say to her, "You sing too much, some day you will cry," but though the tears did come she never lost her gaiety of heart. When she married she was very poor; Monsieur's father had been foolish, loving wine, and they had to make their own way in the world, but she held her head high and did her best for her boys. It should never be said of them that they were educated at the cow's tail (à la queue des bêtes). Her pride came to her aid, and perhaps much of her instinctive good breeding too. Le fils in the Garde Republicaine in Paris has much of his mother's manner.

Leaving the cottage was a terrible wrench. They packed a few odds-and-ends into a bundle, and she tidied everything, saying farewell to the little treasures they had collected in forty-odd years. Silently they locked the doors behind them, her eyes dry, the catastrophe too big for tears. But in the garden Monsieur paused. "Les bêtes," he said; "we mustn't leave them to starve. Open the cow-house door and let them go free." As she turned to obey him her feet faltered, the world swam in a mist of tears. She thrust the key blindly into his hands and stumbled like a drunken woman down the road.

Then for six weeks they trudged together. They slept in fields, in the woods, under carts, in barns, they were drenched with rain and with dew, they were often hungry and thirsty and cold. But they struggled on until they came to Vavincourt, and there the owner of the little house in Bar met them, and seeing what manner of people they were, lent it to them rent free on condition that they looked after the garden. How grateful Madame was, but how intensely she longed for home! How wistfully she turned her eyes northward across the hills! How often the question, When? trembled half spoken on her lips! What mattered it that home was a ruin and she penniless? Just to be in the valley again, to see the sun gleaming on the river.

To help the time to pass less sluggishly by we had invented a little tale, a tale of which I was the unworthy heroine, and the hero an unknown millionaire. The millionaire with gold jusqu'au plafond, who was obligingly waiting for me beyond the sea, and who would come some day and lay his heart, his hand, and his gold-mine at my feet. And then a petit palais would spring miraculously from that much-loved rubbish-heap at Véry, and one day as Madame and le patron stood by the door, they would see a great aeroplane skimming through the sky, it would swoop and settle, and from it would leap the millionaire and his blushing bride. And Madame would lead them in and give them wine and coffee and a salad and saucissons de Lorraine, which are better and more delicious than any other saucissons in all the wide world.

Only a foolish little story, but when one is old and one's heart is weary it is good to be foolish at times, good to spin the sun-kissed webs, good to leave the dark chamber of despair and stray with timid feet over the gleaming meadows of hope.

Her greeting rarely varied. "Je vous croyais morte," a reproach for the supposed infrequency of my visits. She cried it now, though scarcely a week had sped since I saw her last, and then with mysterious winks and nods she hobbled into the house, to return a few minutes later with two or three bunches of grapes and some fine pears. "Pendant la guerre tous les scellés sont levés,"[6] she laughed, but I knew she had not robbed her benefactor. The fruit she kept en cachette for us, she and M. Leblan deprived themselves of, nor could any remonstrance on our part stay her.

"Where is your basket?" She had ordered me to bring one on my next visit, yet here was I, most perplexingly without. But the fruit must be carried home. She had no basket, no paper. Méchante that I was, to come without that basket. Had not she, Madame, commanded it? In vain I refused the gift. She was inexorable.

"Ah, I have it." She seized me with delighted hands, and it was then that the uniform earned my bitterest reproach, for into its pockets, whose size suggested that they were originally intended to hold the guano and rabbits of agricultural relief, went the pears. One might as well argue with a megatherium as with Madame when her mind was made up. So I had to stand in the kitchen growing bulkier and bulkier, with knobs and hillocks and boulders and tussocks sprouting all over me, feeling like a fatted calf, and longing for kindly darkness to swallow me up. Subsequently I slunk home by unfrequented ways, every yard of which seemed to be adorned with a gendarme taking notes. I am convinced that I escaped arrest and decapitation only by a miracle, and that every dog in the town bayed at my heels.

My agonies, needless to say, met with scant sympathy from my companions. They accused me of flirting with M. Leblan, even while they dug greedy teeth into the pears, an accusation it was difficult to refute when he called at the house one evening and, hearing that I was out, refused to leave a message, but turned up later and demanded an interview with such an air of mystery Madame came to call me fluttering so we thought the President of the Republic must be at the door.

Still more difficult was it to refute when Monsieur had gone away, leaving me transfixed on the stairs with two huge bottles of mirabelle plums in my hands. I never dared to tell the three villains who made life such a happy thing on the Boulevard de la Rochelle that Monsieur was wont to say that if only he were twenty years younger he ... he.... Can you guess what he?...