The letter was dated three weeks back.

She did not cry at all.  She remained motionless, so overcome and stupefied that she did not even suffer as yet.  She thought:  “There’s Victor killed now.”  Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and the sorrow filled her heart.  Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful, torturing.  She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never again!  The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the son.  He had been cut in two by a cannon-ball.  She seemed to see the thing, the horrible thing:  the head falling, the eyes open, while he chewed the corner of his big mustache as he always did in moments of anger.

What had they done with his body afterward?  If they had only let her have her boy back as they had brought back her husband—­with the bullet in the middle of the forehead!

But she heard a noise of voices.  It was the Prussians returning from the village.  She hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received them quietly, with her ordinary face, having had time to wipe her eyes.

They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a fine rabbit—­stolen, doubtless—­and they made signs to the old woman that there was to be something good to east.

She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came to killing the rabbit, her heart failed her.  And yet it was not the first.  One of the soldiers struck it down with a blow of his fist behind the ears.

The beast once dead, she skinned the red body, but the sight of the blood which she was touching, and which covered her hands, and which she felt cooling and coagulating, made her tremble from head to foot, and she kept seeing her big boy cut in two, bloody, like this still palpitating animal.

She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not even a mouthful.  They devoured the rabbit without bothering themselves about her.  She looked at them sideways, without speaking, her face so impassive that they perceived nothing.

All of a sudden she said:  “I don’t even know your names, and here’s a whole month that we’ve been together.”  They understood, not without difficulty, what she wanted, and told their names.

That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with the addresses of their families, and, resting her spectacles on her great nose, she contemplated that strange handwriting, then folded the sheet and put it in her pocket, on top of the letter which told her of the death of her son.

When the meal was ended she said to the men: 

“I am going to work for you.”

And she began to carry up hay into the loft where they slept.

They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to them that thus they would not be so cold; and they helped her.  They heaped the stacks of hay as high as the straw roof, and in that manner they made a sort of great chamber with four walls of fodder, warm and perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.