y were passing. He had lacked the courage to remain at Falaise,
and already was regretting that he had left it, declaring that if the
Prussians burned his house it would ruin him. His daughter, a tall, pale
young woman, wept copiously. But Maurice was like a dead man for want
of sleep, and had no ears for the farmer's lamentations; he slumbered
peacefully, soothed by the easy motion of the vehicle, which the little
horse trundled over the ground at such a good round pace that it took
them less than an hour and a half to accomplish the four leagues
between Vouziers and Chene. It was not quite seven o'clock and scarcely
beginning to be dark when the young man rubbed his eyes and alighted in
a rather dazed condition on the public square, near the bridge over the
canal, in front of the modest house where he was born and had passed
twenty years of his life. He got down there in obedience to an
involuntary impulse, although the house had been sold eighteen months
before to a veterinary surgeon, and in reply to the farmer's questions
said that he knew quite well where he was going, adding that he was a
thousand times obliged to him for his kindness.

He continued to stand stock-still, however, beside the well in the
middle of the little triangular _place_; he was as if stunned; his
memory was a blank. Where had he intended to go? and suddenly his wits
returned to him and he remembered that it was to the notary's,
whose house was next door to his father's, and whose mother, Madame
Desvallieres, an aged and most excellent lady, had petted him when
he was an urchin on account of their being neighbors. But he hardly
recognized Chene in the midst of the hurly-burly and confusion into
which the little town, ordinarily so dead, was thrown by the presence of
an army corps encamped at its gates and filling its quiet streets with
officers, couriers, soldiers, and camp-followers and stragglers of every
description. The canal was there as of old, passing through the town
from end to end and bisecting the market-place in the center into two
equal-sized triangles connected by a narrow stone bridge; and there, on
the other bank, was the old market with its moss-grown roofs, and the
Rue Berond leading away to the left and the Sedan road to the right, but
filling the Rue de Vouziers in front of him and extending as far as the
Hotel de Ville was such a compact, swarming, buzzing crowd that he was
obliged to raise his eyes and take a look over th