had wept bitterly when he had fallen at Jemmapes, and left no heir, and the chateau had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins.  The thunder-heats of that dread time had scarcely scorched it.  It had seen a few of its best youth march away to the chant of the Marseillaise to fight on the plains of Champagne; and it had been visited by some patriots in bonnets rouges and soldiers in blue uniforms, who had given it tricoloured cockades and bade it wear them in the holy name of the Republic one and indivisible.  But it had not known what these meant, and its harvests had been reaped without the sound of a shot in its fields or any gleam of steel by its innocent hearths; so that the terrors and the tidings of those noble and ghastly years had left no impress on its generations.

Reine Allix, indeed, the oldest woman among them all, numbering more than ninety years, remembered when she was a child hearing her father and his neighbours talk in low, awe-stricken tones one bitter wintry night of how a king had been slain to save the people; and she remembered likewise—­remembered it well, because it had been her betrothal night and the sixteenth birthday of her life—­how a horseman had flashed through the startled street like a comet, and had called aloud, in a voice of fire, “Gloire! gloire! gloire!—­Marengo!  Marengo!  Marengo!” and how the village had dimly understood that something marvellous for France had happened afar off, and how her brothers and her cousins and her betrothed, and she with them, had all gone up to the high slope over the river, and had piled up a great pyramid of pine wood and straw and dried mosses, and had set flame to it, till it had glowed in its scarlet triumph all through that wondrous night of the sultry summer of victory.

These and the like memories she would sometimes relate to the children at evening when they gathered round her begging for a story.  Otherwise, no memories of the Revolution or the Empire disturbed the tranquility of the Berceau; and even she, after she had told them, would add, “I am not sure now what Marengo was.  A battle, no doubt, but I am not sure where nor why.  But we heard later that little Claudis, my aunt’s youngest-born, a volunteer not nineteen, died at it.  If we had known, we should not have gone up and lit the bonfire.”

This woman, who had been born in that time of famine and flame, was the happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau.  “I am old; yes, I am very old,” she would say, looking up from her spinning-wheel in her house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun, “very old—­ninety-two last summer.  But when one has a roof over one’s head, and a pot of soup always, and a grandson like mine, and when one has lived all one’s life in the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be so old.  Ah, yes, my little ones,—­yes, though you doubt it, you little birds that have just tried your wings,—­it is well to be so old.  One has time to think, and thank the good God, which one never seemed to have a minute to do in that work, work, work when one was young.”