In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into
which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens
news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading
articles of English papers. (There was never any news of French fighting
beyond the official communique and imaginary articles of a romantic kind
written by French journalists in Paris about episodes of war.) In one
corner of the estaminet was a group of bourgeois gentlemen talking
business for a time, and then listening to a monologue from the woman
behind the counter. I could not catch many words of the conversation,
owing to the general chatter, but when the man went out the woman and I
were left alone together, and she came over to me and put a photograph
down on the table before me, and, as though carrying on her previous
train of thought, said, in French, of course:
“Yes, that is what the war has done to me.”
I could not guess her meaning. Looking at the photograph, I saw it was
of a young girl in evening dress with her hair coiled in an artistic way
and a little curl on each cheek. Madame's daughter, I thought, looking
up at the woman standing in front of me in a grubby bodice and tousled
hair. She looked a woman of about forty, with a wan face and beaten
eyes.
“A charming young lady,” I said, glancing again at the portrait.
The woman repeated her last sentence, word for word.
“Yes... that is what the war has done to me.”
I looked up at her again and saw that she had the face of the young girl
in the photograph, but coarsened, aged, raddled, by the passing years
and perhaps by tragedy.
“It is you?” I asked.
“Yes, in 1913, before the war. I have changed since then--n'est-ce pas,
Monsieur?”
“There is a change,” I said. I tried not to express my thought of how
much change.
“You have suffered in the war--more than most people?”
“Ah, I have suffered!”
She told me her story, and word for word, if I could have written it
down then, it would have read like a little novel by Guy de Maupassant.
She was the daughter of people in Lille, well-to-do merchants, and
before the war married a young man of the same town, the son of other
manufacturers. They had two children and were very happy. Then the war
came. The enemy drove down through Belgium, and one day drew near and
threatened Lille. The parents of the young couple said: “We will stay.
We are too old to leave our home, and it is better to keep watch over
the factory. You must go, with the little ones, and there is no time to
lose.”
There was no time to lose. The trains were crowded with fugitives and
soldiers--mostly soldiers. It was necessary to walk. Weeping, the young
husband and wife said farewell to their parents and set out on the long
trail, with the two babies in a perambulator, under a load of bread and
wine, and a little maid carrying some clothes in a bundle. For days they
tramped the roads until they were all dusty and bedraggled and footsore,
but glad to be getting farther away from that tide of field-gray men
which had now swamped over Lille. The young husband comforted his wife.
“Courage!” he said. “I have money enough to carry us through the war.
We will set up a little shop somewhere.” The maid wept bitterly now and
then, but the young husband said: “We will take care of you, Margot.
There is nothing to fear. We are lucky in our escape.” He was a delicate
fellow, rejected for military service, but brave. They came to Amiens,
and hired the estaminet and set up business. There was a heavy debt to
work off for capital and expenses before they would make money, but they
were doing well. The mother was happy with her children, and the little
maid had dried her tears. Then one day the young husband went away with
the little maid and all the money, leaving his wife in the estaminet
with a big debt to pay and a broken heart.
“That is what the war has done to me,” she said again, picking up the
photograph of the girl in the evening frock with a little curl on each
cheek.
“C'est triste, Madame!”
“Oui, c'est triste, Monsieur!”
But it was not war that had caused her tragedy, except that it had
unloosened the roots of her family life. Guy de Maupassant would have
given just such an ending to his story.