Bernadou was very good to her. The lad, as she called him, was five and
twenty years old, tall and straight and clean-limbed, with the blue eyes
of the North, and a gentle, frank face. He worked early and late in
the plot of ground that gave him his livelihood. He lived with his
grandmother, and tended her with a gracious courtesy and veneration
that never altered. He was not very wise; he also could neither read nor
write; he believed in his priest and his homestead, and loved the ground
that he had trodden ever since his first steps from the cradle had been
guided by Reine Allix. He had never been drawn for the conscription,
because he was the only support of a woman of ninety; he likewise had
never been half a dozen kilometres from his birthplace. When he was
bidden to vote, and he asked what his vote of assent would pledge him to
do, they told him, "It will bind you to honour your grandmother so long
as she shall live, and to get up with the lark, and to go to mass
every Sunday, and to be a loyal son to your country. Nothing more."
And thereat he had smiled and straightened his stalwart frame, and gone
right willingly to the voting-urn.

He was very stupid in these things; and Reine Allix, though clear-headed
and shrewd, was hardly more learned in them than he.

"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my babyhood there was
the old white flag upon the chateau. Well, they pulled that down and put
up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three colours.
Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one day and
set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was done that was
down again and the tricolour again up where it is. Now, some I know
fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of the flags;
but as for me, I could not see that any one of them mattered: bread