To-night the fallen leaves in the sunset made the garden a place all of amber. One looked down into an amber glow. And all the roofs and treetops of the quarter, and the two tall towers of Sainte Clotilde, seemed translucent; for the gold of the sunset to shine through.
The kitchen has a floor of polished red brick tiles and shines with beautiful copper pots.
Eleven little soldiers were just finishing their coffee at the table with the red cloth.
What babies they are. And how alike they look, all of them. It is absurd. Eleven round close-cropped heads; eleven round rosy peasant faces; eleven pairs of round clear eager questioning eyes; eleven straight young figures, with stiff gestures, in bleu d'horizon.
Classe Seize, eighteen years, nineteen years, twenty years. It has become the age to die.
I went to get some chocolates at a little shop near the hospital.
The woman of the shop counted me out the heap of chocolates one by one in their silver paper.
She was a thin pale little woman with the sort of blue eyes that are always sad. Her eyes looked as if they had cried and cried, in her worn faded little face. She had the little woollen cape of the quarter around her shoulders and her pale hair was rather grey.
While she was counting the chocolates the postman came. He brought a big square yellow envelope addressed in that special writing, surely, of a little soldier, and with the franchise militaire.
She took it, thanking the postman, and put it down on the table and went on counting out the chocolates.
"But, Madame," I said, "are you not going to read your letter?"
She turned and I saw that she was crying.
She began putting the chocolates in handfuls into a paper bag.
She said, "This morning I had a notice from the Mairie that he is killed."
On a table in the window there was an opal-blue bowl full of water, with purple iris floating in it, and little bright goldfish, four of them, glinting through it.
Some one had given it that day to the children.
René, the eldest boy, stood by the table watching the goldfish, not thinking of his father at all.
There were minutes in the days when he did not think of his father.
But afterwards it was always the same thing.
He never told any one, because he was seven years old and very shy. No one would have understood. And it was dreadful to him when people did not understand.