Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very withered and very bent and very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light in them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had bronzed it with its harvest suns and blown on it with its winter winds.  She wore always the same garb of homely dark-blue serge, always the same tall white head-gear, always the same pure silver ear-rings that had been at once an heirloom and a nuptial gift.  She was always shod in her wooden sabots, and she always walked abroad with a staff of ash.  She had been born in the Berceau de Dieu; had lived there and wedded there; had toiled there all her life, and never left it for a greater distance than a league, or for a longer time than a day.  She loved it with an intense love.  The world beyond it was nothing to her; she scarcely believed in it as existing.  She could neither read nor write.  She told the truth, reared her offspring in honesty, and praised God always—­had praised Him when starving in a bitter winter after her husband’s death, when there had been no field work, and she had had five children to feed and clothe; and praised Him now that her sons were all dead before her, and all she had living of her blood was her grandson Bernadou.

Her life had been a hard one.  Her parents had been hideously poor.  Her marriage had scarcely bettered her condition.  She had laboured in the fields always, hoeing and weeding and reaping and carrying wood and driving mules, and continually rising with the first streak of daybreak.  She had known fever and famine and all manner of earthly ills.  But now in her old age she had peace.  Two of her dead sons, who had sought their fortunes in the other hemisphere, had left her a little money, and she had a little cottage and a plot of ground, and a pig, and a small orchard.  She was well-to-do, and could leave it all to Bernadou; and for ten years she had been happy, perfectly happy, in the coolness and the sweetness and the old familiar ways and habits of the Berceau.

Bernadou was very good to her.  The lad, as she called him, was five and twenty years old, tall and straight and clean-limbed, with the blue eyes of the North, and a gentle, frank face.  He worked early and late in the plot of ground that gave him his livelihood.  He lived with his grandmother, and tended her with a gracious courtesy and veneration that never altered.  He was not very wise; he also could neither read nor write; he believed in his priest and his homestead, and loved the ground that he had trodden ever since his first steps from the cradle had been guided by Reine Allix.  He had never been drawn for the conscription, because he was the only support of a woman of ninety; he likewise had never been half a dozen kilometres from his birthplace.  When he was bidden to vote, and he asked what his vote of assent would pledge him to do, they told him, “It will bind you to honour your grandmother so long as she shall live, and to get up with the lark, and to go to mass every Sunday, and to be a loyal son to your country.  Nothing more.”  And thereat he had smiled and straightened his stalwart frame, and gone right willingly to the voting-urn.