“I tell you I saw it with my own eyes.”

“And she refused?”

“Because the Prussian was in the next room!”

“Surely you are mistaken?”

“I swear I’m telling you the truth.”

The count was choking with laughter.  The manufacturer held his sides.  Loiseau continued: 

“So you may well imagine he doesn’t think this evening’s business at all amusing.”

And all three began to laugh again, choking, coughing, almost ill with merriment.

Then they separated.  But Madame Loiseau, who was nothing if not spiteful, remarked to her husband as they were on the way to bed that “that stuck-up little minx of a Carre-Lamadon had laughed on the wrong side of her mouth all the evening.”

“You know,” she said, “when women run after uniforms it’s all the same to them whether the men who wear them are French or Prussian.  It’s perfectly sickening!”

The next morning the snow showed dazzling white tinder a clear winter sun.  The coach, ready at last, waited before the door; while a flock of white pigeons, with pink eyes spotted in the centres with black, puffed out their white feathers and walked sedately between the legs of the six horses, picking at the steaming manure.

The driver, wrapped in his sheepskin coat, was smoking a pipe on the box, and all the passengers, radiant with delight at their approaching departure, were putting up provisions for the remainder of the journey.

They were waiting only for Boule de Suif.  At last she appeared.

She seemed rather shamefaced and embarrassed, and advanced with timid step toward her companions, who with one accord turned aside as if they had not seen her.  The count, with much dignity, took his wife by the arm, and removed her from the unclean contact.

The girl stood still, stupefied with astonishment; then, plucking up courage, accosted the manufacturer’s wife with a humble “Good-morning, madame,” to which the other replied merely with a slight and insolent nod, accompanied by a look of outraged virtue.  Every one suddenly appeared extremely busy, and kept as far from Boule de Suif as if her skirts had been infected with some deadly disease.  Then they hurried to the coach, followed by the despised courtesan, who, arriving last of all, silently took the place she had occupied during the first part of the journey.

The rest seemed neither to see nor to know her—­all save Madame Loiseau, who, glancing contemptuously in her direction, remarked, half aloud, to her husband: 

“What a mercy I am not sitting beside that creature!”

The lumbering vehicle started on its way, and the journey began afresh.

At first no one spoke.  Boule de Suif dared not even raise her eyes.  She felt at once indignant with her neighbors, and humiliated at having yielded to the Prussian into whose arms they had so hypocritically cast her.

But the countess, turning toward Madame Carre-Lamadon, soon broke the painful silence: