Short Fiction

regaining his composure, he approached the old woman, and said:

“Ah, ha! mamma, you are better today. Oh! I never had any doubt but you would come round again; in fact, I said to myself as I was mounting the staircase: ‘I have an idea that I shall find the old woman on her feet once more.’ ” Then he tapped her gently on the back: “Ah! she is as solid as the Pont-Neuf, she will bury us all out: you will see if she does not.”

He sat down, accepted the coffee that was offered him, and soon began to join in the conversation of the two men, backing up Braux, for he himself had been mixed up in the Commune.

Now the old woman, feeling herself fatigued, wished to leave the room, at which Caravan rushed forward. She thereupon looked him in the eyes and said to him:

“You must carry my clock and chest of drawers upstairs again without a moment’s delay.”

“Yes, mamma,” he replied, stammering; “yes, I will do so.”

The old woman then took the arm of her daughter and withdrew from the room. The two Caravans remained rooted to the floor, silent, plunged in the deepest despair, while Braux rubbed his hands and sipped his coffee, gleefully.

Suddenly Madame Caravan, consumed with rage, attacked him, exclaiming: “You are a thief, a scoundrel, a cur. I would spit in your face, if⁠—I would⁠—I⁠—would⁠—” She could find nothing further to say, suffocating as she was with rage, while Braux still sipped his coffee, laughing.

His wife, returning just then, rushed at her sister-in-law, and both⁠—the one with her enormous bulk, the other, epileptic and spare⁠—with angry voices and hands trembling, hurled wild insults at each other.

Chenet and Braux now interposed, and the latter, taking his better half by the shoulders, pushed her out of the door in front of him, shouting:

“Get out, you ass: you make too much noise.” Then the two were heard in the street quarrelling with each other, until they had disappeared in the distance.

Monsieur Chenet also took his departure, leaving the Caravans alone, face to face. The husband fell back in his chair, and with the cold sweat standing out in beads on his temples murmured: “What on earth shall I say at the office?”

Boule de Suif

For several days in succession straggling remnants of the routed army had passed through the town. They were not the regular army, but a disjointed rabble, the men unshaven and dirty, their uniforms in tatters, slouching along without regimental colors, without order⁠—worn out, broken down, incapable of thought or resolution, marching from pure habit and dropping with fatigue the moment they stopped. The majority belonged to the militia, men of peaceful pursuits, retired from business, sinking under the weight of their accoutrements; quick-witted little militiamen as prone to terror as they were to enthusiasm, as ready to attack as they were to fly; and here and there a few red trousers, remnants of a company mowed down in one of the big battles; sombre-coated artillerymen, side by side with these various uniforms of the infantry, and now and then the glittering helmet of a heavily booted dragoon who followed with difficulty the march of the lighter-footed soldiers of the line.

Companies of franc-tireurs, heroically named “Avengers of the Defeat,” “Citizens of the Tomb,” “Companions in Death,” passed in their turn, looking like a horde of bandits.

Their chiefs⁠—formerly drapers or corn-dealers, retired soap-boilers or suet-refiners, temporary heroes, created officers for their money or the length of their moustaches, heaped with arms, flannels, and gold lace⁠—talked loudly, discussed plans of campaign, and gave you to understand that they were the sole support of France in her death-agony; but they were generally in terror of their own soldiers, gallows birds, most of them brave to foolhardiness, all of them given to pillage and debauchery.

Report said that the Prussians were about to enter Rouen. The National Guard, which for two months past had made the most careful reconnoitreings in the neighbouring wood, even to the extent of occasionally shooting their own sentries and putting themselves in battle array if a rabbit stirred in the brushwood, had now retired to their domestic hearths; their arms, their uniforms, all the murderous apparatus with which they had been wont to strike terror to the hearts of all beholders for three leagues round, had vanished.

Finally, the last of the French soldiery crossed the Seine on their way to Pont-Audemer by Saint Sever and Bourg-Achard; and then, last of all, came their despairing general tramping on foot between two orderlies, powerless to attempt any action with these disjointed fragments of his forces, himself utterly dazed and bewildered by the downfall of a people accustomed to victory and now so disastrously beaten in spite of its traditional bravery.

After that a profound calm, the silence of terrified suspense, fell over the city. Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest their meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come under the category of arms.

Life seemed to have come to a standstill, the shops were closed, the streets silent. From time to time an inhabitant, intimidated by their silence, would flit rapidly along the pavement, keeping close to the walls.

In this anguish of suspense, men longed for the coming of the enemy.

In the latter part of the day following the departure of the French troops, some Uhlans, appearing from goodness knows where, traversed the city hastily. A little later, a black mass descended from the direction of Sainte-Catherine, while two more invading torrents poured in from the roads from Darnétal and Boisguillaume. The advance guards of the three corps converged at the same moment into the square of the Hotel de Ville, while battalion after battalion of the German army wound in through the adjacent streets, making the pavement ring under their heavy rhythmic tramp.

Orders shouted in strange and guttural tones were echoed back by the apparently dead and deserted houses, while