The Cure’s niece was buried there.  She was the prettiest girl in Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German officer and disgraced the town.  He was a young Bavarian, quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit up half the night in the garden with his head in his hands—­homesick, lovesick.  He was always after this Marie Louise; never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the ground under her feet, the old woman said.  The girl hated Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him.  He was sent to the front.  Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while.  That spring a story got about that some woman met him at night in the German graveyard.  The Germans had taken the land behind the church for their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Cure’s garden.  When the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in the forest.  The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her with disdain.  But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the Cure.  One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself.  She was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.

“And the Bavarian?” Claude asked David later.  The story had become so complicated he could not follow it.

“He justified her, and promptly.  He took the same pistol and shot himself through the temples.  His orderly, stationed at the edge of the thicket to keep watch, heard the first shot and ran toward them.  He saw the officer take up the smoking pistol and turn it on himself.  But the Kommandant couldn’t believe that one of his officers had so much feeling.  He held an enquete, dragged the girl’s mother and uncle into court, and tried to establish that they were in conspiracy with her to seduce and murder a German officer.  The orderly was made to tell the whole story; how and where they began to meet.  Though he wasn’t very delicate about the details he divulged, he stuck to his statement that he saw Lieutenant Muller shoot himself with his own hand, and the Kommandant failed to prove his case.  The old Cure had known nothing of all this until he heard it aired in the military court.  Marie Louise had lived in his house since she was a child, and was like his daughter.  He had a stroke or something, and has been like this ever since.  The girl’s friends forgave her, and when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take flowers to her grave.  The Kommandant put up an affiche on the hedge, forbidding any one to decorate the grave.  Apparently, nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than poor Marie Louise.”