in relief against the chalky facades bristling with Austrian guns, pouring forth their ammunition on the enemy below.  The soldiers burst into the houses, the courtyards, the enclosures; every instant you hear the breaking open of doors, the crashing of windows, and the scuffling of the terrified inmates.  The white uniforms retire in disorder.  The village belongs to the French!  Not just yet, though.  From the last houses on the street, to the entrance of the cemetery, is rising ground, and just behind stands a small hillock.  The enemy has retrenched itself there, and, from its cannons ranged in battery, is raining a terrible shower on the village just evacuated.

The assailants hesitate, and draw back before this hailstorm of iron; suddenly a general appears from under the walls of a building already crumbling under the continuous fire, spurs his horse forward, and shouts:  “Come, boys, let us carry the fort!”

Among the first to rally to this call, one rifleman in particular, a fine, broad-shouldered active fellow, with a brown moustache and olive complexion, darts forward to the point indicated.  It is Claudet.  Others are behind him, and soon more than a hundred men, with their bayonets, are hurling themselves along the cemetery road; the grand chasserot leaps across the fields, as he used formerly in pursuit of the game in the Charbonniere forest.  The soldiers are falling right and left of him, but he hardly sees them; he continues pressing forward, breathless, excited, scarcely stopping to think.  As he is crossing one of the meadows, however, he notices the profusion of scarlet gladiolus and also observes that the rye and barley grow somewhat sturdier here than in his country; these are the only definite ideas that detach themselves clearly from his seething brain.  The wall of the cemetery is scaled; they are fighting now in the ditches, killing one another on the side of the hill; at last, the fort is taken and they begin routing the enemy.  But, at this moment, Claudet stoops to pick up a cartridge, a ball strikes him in the forehead, and, without a sound, he drops to the ground, among the noisome fennels which flourish in graveyards—­he drops, thinking of the clock of his native village.

......................

“I have sad news for you,” said Julien to Reine, as he entered the garden of La Thuiliere, one June afternoon.

He had received official notice the evening before, through the mayor, of the decease of “Germain-Claudet Sejournant, volunteer in the seventeenth battalion of light infantry, killed in an engagement with the enemy, May 20, 1859.”

Reine was standing between two hedges of large peasant-roses.  At the first words that fell from M. de Buxieres’s lips, she felt a presentiment of misfortune.

“Claudet?” murmured she.

“He is dead,” replied Julien, almost inaudibly, “he fought bravely and was killed at Montebello.”