wheat and oats and cheese and fruit and eggs was more than sufficient
for its simple prosperity. Its people were hardy, kindly, laborious,
happy; living round the little gray chapel in amity and good-fellowship.
Nothing troubled it. War and rumours of war, revolutions and
counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and political
questions--these all were for it things unknown and unheard of, mighty
winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came
near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did in its loneliness like
any lark's nest. Even in the great days of the Revolution it had been
quiet. It had had a lord whom it loved in the old castle on the hill at
whose feet it nestled; it had never tried to harm him, and it had wept
bitterly when he had fallen at Jemmapes, and left no heir, and the
chateau had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins. The thunder-heats of that
dread time had scarcely scorched it. It had seen a few of its best youth
march away to the chant of the Marseillaise to fight on the plains of
Champagne; and it had been visited by some patriots in _bonnets rouges_
and soldiers in blue uniforms, who had given it tricoloured cockades and
bade it wear them in the holy name of the Republic one and indivisible.
But it had not known what these meant, and its harvests had been reaped
without the sound of a shot in its fields or any gleam of steel by its
innocent hearths; so that the terrors and the tidings of those noble and
ghastly years had left no impress on its generations.

Reine Allix, indeed, the oldest woman among them all, numbering more
than ninety years, remembered when she was a child hearing her father
and his neighbours talk in low, awe-stricken tones one bitter wintry
night of how a king had been slain to save the people; and she
remembered likewise--remembered it well, because it had been her
betrothal night and the sixteenth birthday of her life--how a horseman
had flashed through the startled street like a comet, and had called