The town itself seemed to be living on its past, for indubitably it had seen better days.  An ancient foundation of the Jesuits now converted into the Map and Printing Department of the R.E.’s, a church whose huge nave had been secularised to the uses of motor transport, a museum which served to incarcerate the German prisoners, all testified to the vanished greatness, as did also the private mansions, which preserved a kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and massive double doors.  There was one such which I never passed at night without thinking of the Sieur de Maletroit’s door.  The streets were narrow, tortuous, and secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no great effort of the imagination—­especially at night when not a light showed—­to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch which they must have witnessed some centuries before.  The very names of the streets—­such as the Rue d’Arbalete—­held in them something of romance.  To find one’s billet at night was like a game of blind man’s buff, and one felt rather than saw one’s way.  Not a soul was to be seen, for the whole town was under droit de siege, and the civilian inhabitants had to be within doors by nine o’clock, while all the entrances and exits to and from the town were guarded by double sentries night and day.  Certain dark doorways also secreted a solitary sentry, and my own office boasted a corporal’s guard—­presumably because the Field-Cashier had his rooms on the first floor.  The sanitation was truly medieval; on either side of the cobbled streets noisome gutters formed an open sewer into which housewives emptied their slop-pails every morning, while mongrel dogs nosed among the garbage.  Yet the precincts were not without a certain beauty, and every side of the town was approached through an avenue of limes or poplars.  But in winter the sodden landscape was desolate beyond belief, these roads presenting just that aspect of a current of slime in a muddy sea which they suggested to the lonely horseman on the eve of Waterloo in that little classic of De Vigny’s known to literature as Laurette.

Such was the country and such the town in which we were billeted.  Now upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car, and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub.  “Vous etes une blanchisseuse, aujourd’hui?” I remarked.  She corrected me.  “Non, m’sieu’, une lessiveuse.”  “Une lessiveuse?” For answer Jeanne pointed to a linen-bag which was steeping in the tub.  The linen-bag contained the ashes of the beech-tree; it is a way of washing that they have in some parts of France, and very cleansing.  To specialise thus is lessiver.  As we talked in this desultory fashion I let fall a word concerning a journey I was about to undertake