se it had nothing about war in it, and
Minette and Clarisse used to cry so when it was told, that the Sergeant
would stop and put his arms around them and pet them until they only
sobbed on his shoulder.
It was of how he had, when a lonely old man, met down in Lorraine his
little Camille, whose eyes were as blue as the sky, and her hand as
white as the flower from which she took her name, and her cheeks as pink
as the roses in the gardens of the Tuileries. He had loved her, and she,
though forty years his junior, had married him and had come here to live
with him; but the close walls of the city had not suited her, and she
had pined and languished before his eyes like a plucked lily, and, after
she bore him Pierre, had died in his arms, and left him lonelier than
before. And the old soldier always lowered his voice and paused a moment
(Raoul said he was saying a mass), and then he would add consolingly:
"But she lef-
t a soldier, and when I am gone, should France ever need
one, Pierre will be here." The boys did not fancy this story for the
reasons given, and besides, although they loved the Sergeant, they did
not like Pierre. Pierre was not popular in the Quarter,--except with the
young girls and a few special friends. The women said he was idle and
vain like his mother, who had been, they said, a silly lazy thing with
little to boast of but blue eyes and a white skin, of which she was too
proud to endanger it by work, and that she had married the Sergeant for
his pension, and would have ruined him if she had lived, and that Pierre
was just like her.
The children knew nothing of the resemblance. They disliked Pierre
because he was cross and disagreeable to them, and however their older
sisters might admire his curling brown hair, his dark eyes, and delicate
features, which he had likewise inherited from his mother, they did not-