“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.

There are families like that in France, and many of them, more than one ventures to say.  Our poor country is in many respects calumniated by certain novelists, who draw exaggerated and distorted pictures of it.  It is true the history of good people is often monotonous or painful.  This story is a proof of it.

The grief of Jean was the grief of a man.  He remained long sad and silent.  The evening of his father’s funeral the Abbe Constantin took him home to the vicarage.  The day had been rainy and cold.  Jean was sitting by the fireside; the priest was reading his breviary opposite him.  Old Pauline came and went, arranging her affairs.

An hour passed without a word, when Jean, raising his head, said: 

“Godfather, did my father leave me any money?”

This question was so extraordinary that the old priest, stupefied, could scarcely believe that he heard aright.