"Paying taxes with naught to pay them with is what the rest of France has
been doing these many years, but we never knew the bitterness of that
before. We shall know it now."

And so she went on talking about it and growing more and more troubled
about it, until one could see that it was filling all her mind.

At last we came upon a dreadful object. It was the madman--hacked and
stabbed to death in his iron cage in the corner of the square. It was a
bloody and dreadful sight. Hardly any of us young people had ever seen a
man before who had lost his life by violence; so this cadaver had an
awful fascination for us; we could not take our eyes from it. I mean, it
had that sort of fascination for all of us but one. That one was Joan.
She turned away in horror, and could not be persuaded to go near it
again. There--it is a striking reminder that we are but creatures of use
and custom; yes, and it is a reminder, too, of how harshly and unfairly
fate deals with us sometimes. For it was so ordered that the very ones
among us who were most fascinated with mutilated and bloody death were to
live their lives in peace, while that other, who had a native and deep
horror of it, must presently go forth and have it as a familiar spectacle
every day on the field of battle.

You may well believe that we had plenty of matter for talk now, since the
raiding of our village seemed by long odds the greatest event that had
really ever occurred in the world; for although these dull peasants may
have thought they recognized the bigness of some of the previous
occurrences that had filtered from the world's history dimly into their
minds, the truth is that they hadn't. One biting little fact, visible to
their eyes of flesh and felt in their own personal vitals, became at once
more prodigious to them than the grandest remote episode in the world's