At Virelogne I loved the whole countryside, dotted with little woods and crossed by brooks which sparkled in the sun and looked like veins carrying blood to the earth.  You fished in them for crawfish, trout and eels.  Divine happiness!  You could bathe in places and you often found snipe among the high grass which grew along the borders of these small water courses.

I was stepping along light as a goat, watching my two dogs running ahead of me, Serval, a hundred metres to my right, was beating a field of lucerne.  I turned round by the thicket which forms the boundary of the wood of Sandres and I saw a cottage in ruins.

Suddenly I remembered it as I had seen it the last time, in 1869, neat, covered with vines, with chickens before the door.  What is sadder than a dead house, with its skeleton standing bare and sinister?

I also recalled that inside its doors, after a very tiring day, the good woman had given me a glass of wine to drink and that Serval had told me the history of its people.  The father, an old poacher, had been killed by the gendarmes.  The son, whom I had once seen, was a tall, dry fellow who also passed for a fierce slayer of game.  People called them “Les Sauvage.”

Was that a name or a nickname?

I called to Serval.  He came up with his long strides like a crane.

I asked him: 

“What’s become of those people?”

This was his story: 

When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house.  People did not pity the old woman very much because she had money; they knew it.

She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the village, on the edge of the wood.  She was not afraid, however, being of the same strain as the men folk—­a hardy old woman, tall and thin, who seldom laughed and with whom one never jested.  The women of the fields laugh but little in any case, that is men’s business.  But they themselves have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy, gloomy life.  The peasants imbibe a little noisy merriment at the tavern, but their helpmates always have grave, stern countenances.  The muscles of their faces have never learned the motions of laughter.

Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which was soon covered by the snows.  She came to the village once a week to get bread and a little meat.  Then she returned to her house.  As there was talk of wolves, she went out with a gun upon her shoulder—­her son’s gun, rusty and with the butt worn by the rubbing of the hand—­and she was a strange sight, the tall “Sauvage,” a little bent, going with slow strides over the snow, the muzzle of the piece extending beyond the black headdress, which confined her head and imprisoned her white hair, which no one had ever seen.

One day a Prussian force arrived.  It was billeted upon the inhabitants, according to the property and resources of each.  Four were allotted to the old woman, who was known to be rich.