The blockade was as carefully arranged as if they were investing a fortress.  Each agreed on the role which he or she was to play, the arguments to be used, the maneuvers to be executed.  They decided on the plan of campaign, the stratagems they were to employ, and the surprise attacks which were to reduce this human citadel and force it to receive the enemy within its walls.

But Cornudet remained apart from the rest, taking no share in the plot.

So absorbed was the attention of all that Boule de Suif’s entrance was almost unnoticed.  But the count whispered a gentle “Hush!” which made the others look up.  She was there.  They suddenly stopped talking, and a vague embarrassment prevented them for a few moments from addressing her.  But the countess, more practiced than the others in the wiles of the drawing-room, asked her: 

“Was the baptism interesting?”

The girl, still under the stress of emotion, told what she had seen and heard, described the faces, the attitudes of those present, and even the appearance of the church.  She concluded with the words: 

“It does one good to pray sometimes.”

Until lunch time the ladies contented themselves with being pleasant to her, so as to increase her confidence and make her amenable to their advice.

As soon as they took their seats at table the attack began.  First they opened a vague conversation on the subject of self-sacrifice.  Ancient examples were quoted:  Judith and Holofernes; then, irrationally enough, Lucrece and Sextus; Cleopatra and the hostile generals whom she reduced to abject slavery by a surrender of her charms.  Next was recounted an extraordinary story, born of the imagination of these ignorant millionaires, which told how the matrons of Rome seduced Hannibal, his lieutenants, and all his mercenaries at Capua.  They held up to admiration all those women who from time to time have arrested the victorious progress of conquerors, made of their bodies a field of battle, a means of ruling, a weapon; who have vanquished by their heroic caresses hideous or detested beings, and sacrificed their chastity to vengeance and devotion.

All was said with due restraint and regard for propriety, the effect heightened now and then by an outburst of forced enthusiasm calculated to excite emulation.

A listener would have thought at last that the one role of woman on earth was a perpetual sacrifice of her person, a continual abandonment of herself to the caprices of a hostile soldiery.

The two nuns seemed to hear nothing, and to be lost in thought.  Boule de Suif also was silent.

During the whole afternoon she was left to her reflections.  But instead of calling her “madame” as they had done hitherto, her companions addressed her simply as “mademoiselle,” without exactly knowing why, but as if desirous of making her descend a step in the esteem she had won, and forcing her to realize her degraded position.