Madame de Lavardens had a great regard for Dr. Reynaud, and one day she made him the following proposal: 

“Send Jean to me every morning,” said she, “I will send him home in the evening.  Paul’s tutor is a very accomplished man; he will make the children work together.  It will be rendering me a real service.  Jean will set Paul a good example.”

Things were thus arranged, and the little bourgeois set the little nobleman a most excellent example of industry and application, but this excellent example was not followed.

The war broke out.  On November 14th, at seven o’clock in the morning, the mobiles of Souvigny assembled in the great square of the town; their chaplain was the Abbe Constantin, their surgeon-major, Dr. Reynaud.  The same idea had come at the same moment to both; the priest was sixty-two, the doctor fifty.

When they started, the battalion followed the road which led through Longueval, and which passed before the doctor’s house.  Madame Reynaud and Jean were waiting by the roadside.  The child threw himself into his father’s arms.

“Take me, too, papa! take me, too!”

Madame Reynaud wept.  The doctor held them both in a long embrace, then he continued his way.

A hundred steps farther the road made a sharp curve.  The doctor turned, cast one long look at his wife and child-the last; he was never to see them again.

On January 8, 1871, the mobiles of Souvigny attacked the village of Villersexel, occupied by the Prussians, who had barricaded themselves.  The firing began.  A mobile who marched in the front rank received a ball in the chest and fell.  There was a short moment of trouble and hesitation.

“Forward! forward!” shouted the officers.

The men passed over the body of their comrade, and under a hail of bullets entered the town.

Dr. Reynaud and the Abbe Constantin marched with the troops; they stopped by the wounded man; the blood was rushing in floods from his mouth.

“There is nothing to be done,” said the doctor.  “He is dying; he belongs to you.”

The priest knelt down by the dying man, and the doctor rose to go toward the village.  He had not taken ten steps when he stopped, beat the air with both hands, and fell all at once to the ground.  The priest ran to him; he was dead-killed on the spot by a bullet through the temples.  That evening the village was ours, and the next day they placed in the cemetery of Villersexel the body of Dr. Reynaud.

Two months later the Abbe Constantin took back to Longueval the coffin of his friend, and behind the coffin, when it was carried from the church, walked an orphan.  Jean had also lost his mother.  At the news of her husband’s death, Madame Reynaud had remained for twenty-four hours petrified, crushed, without a word or a tear; then fever had seized her, then delirium, and after a fortnight, death.

Jean was alone in the world; he was fourteen years old.  Of that family, where for more than a century all had been good and honest, there remained only a child kneeling beside a grave; but he, too, promised to be what his father and grandfather before him had been—­good, and honest, and true.