“Two days later Monsieur de Bourneval killed Monsieur de Courcils in a duel.  My brothers, to avoid a terrible scandal, held their tongues.  I offered them and they accepted half the fortune which my mother had left me.  I took my real father’s name, renouncing that which the law gave me, but which was not really mine.  Monsieur de Bourneval died three years later and I am still inconsolable.”

He rose from his chair, walked up and down the room, and, standing in front of me, said: 

“Well, I say that my mother’s will was one of the most beautiful, the most loyal, as well as one of the grandest acts that a woman could perform.  Do you not think so?”

I held out both hands to him, saying: 

“I most certainly do, my friend.”

WALTER SCHNAFFS’ ADVENTURE

Ever since he entered France with the invading army Walter Schnaffs had considered himself the most unfortunate of men.  He was large, had difficulty in walking, was short of breath and suffered frightfully with his feet, which were very flat and very fat.  But he was a peaceful, benevolent man, not warlike or sanguinary, the father of four children whom he adored, and married to a little blonde whose little tendernesses, attentions and kisses he recalled with despair every evening.  He liked to rise late and retire early, to eat good things in a leisurely manner and to drink beer in the saloon.  He reflected, besides, that all that is sweet in existence vanishes with life, and he maintained in his heart a fearful hatred, instinctive as well as logical, for cannon, rifles, revolvers and swords, but especially for bayonets, feeling that he was unable to dodge this dangerous weapon rapidly enough to protect his big paunch.

And when night fell and he lay on the ground, wrapped in his cape beside his comrades who were snoring, he thought long and deeply about those he had left behind and of the dangers in his path.  “If he were killed what would become of the little ones?  Who would provide for them and bring them up?” Just at present they were not rich, although he had borrowed when he left so as to leave them some money.  And Walter Schnaffs wept when he thought of all this.

At the beginning of a battle his legs became so weak that he would have fallen if he had not reflected that the entire army would pass over his body.  The whistling of the bullets gave him gooseflesh.

For months he had lived thus in terror and anguish.

His company was marching on Normandy, and one day he was sent to reconnoitre with a small detachment, simply to explore a portion of the territory and to return at once.  All seemed quiet in the country; nothing indicated an armed resistance.

But as the Prussians were quietly descending into a little valley traversed by deep ravines a sharp fusillade made them halt suddenly, killing twenty of their men, and a company of sharpshooters, suddenly emerging from a little wood as large as your hand, darted forward with bayonets at the end of their rifles.