Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
lit from beneath with evening.

I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I
addressed myself.

It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant
woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of
great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of
Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was
a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner,
until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great
placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little
hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters
were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'.
Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to
be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous
italics--

Quand ce coq chantera
Ici credit l'on fera.