The general divines that now is the moment to be heroic; he jumps down to the rails, sinks knee-deep in the snow and overtakes the man with the lamp. He says something to him in an undertone.
“I don’t care though it was the Grand Mogul, I couldn’t do anything,” answers the railwayman. “However, we are opposite a gate-keeper’s house, there should be a fire there.... And if the lady cares to get down.... Hey, Sabatier!...”
A second lamp comes up.
“Just go and see if there is a fire in the gate-keeper’s house.”
By great good-fortune there is. The general is happier than if he had won a battle or finished the last strip of his famous knitted bedspread. He returns to the Queen’s compartment, announces the result of his exertions, and, an instant afterwards, the three travellers, with much stamping of feet to shake off the snow that has gathered under their shoes, are in the low room of the tiny house, where the gate-keeper, who has just let them in and has kept on his goatskin, kneels in front of the fire and puts dead wood on the fire-dogs.
The Queen, seated in front of the cheerful blaze, has thrown her pelisse over the back of her straw-bottomed chair; she has taken off her long suède gloves to warm her hands, and is looking about her.
It is a peasant’s room. The floor is hard and uneven underfoot; bunches of onions hang from the smoky beams; there is an old poacher’s gun on two nails over the fire-place, and some flowered dishes on the dresser. The general has just made a wry face on catching sight of two Épinal pictures fastened to the wall with pins: the portrait of M. de Thiers, decorated with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, and that of Garibaldi in a red shirt. But what attracts the young Queen’s attention is, beside the great bed, and half hidden by the curtains of striped calico, a wicker cradle, from which the whimpering of a waking child has just sounded.
In a moment the gate-keeper has left his fire and has gone to the cradle, and there he is rocking it gently.
“Go bye-bye, my biddie, go bye-bye! It’s nothing, it’s friends of papa.”
He looks a good father, the man in the goatskin, with his bald Saint Peter’s pate, his fierce old soldier’s moustache, and the two great, sad wrinkles in his cheeks.