We Are French! (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III M. AGNEAU GETS A LETTER There must have been an element of prophecy in Pierre Dupont's monologue in Loiseau's tavern that afternoon. There often is in faith like his?when it dares express itself. Chatillon was one of those villages whose names, when printed on maps at all, appear in very small italics. There was only one street, and this merely a part of the National Road by which the automobilists rushed by from Paris on their way to the eastern frontier and back again. The houses, all of them built of stone and most of them with roofs of thatch, were homely, small and plain. Here and there, even where the walls had been repeatedly white-washed, were still to be seen deep scratches and pot-marks, put there by the bullets of the invaders in 1870. In one of these cottages?the last one to the east along Chatillon's single street?PierreDupont and Anatole Picard had lived ever since that long and fruitless quest of theirs for the missing Gabrielle. The house was somehow characteristic of its inhabitants, as houses often are. There was its location, for example?closer than any of its neighbors to the blood-drenched frontier. More than any of its neighbors, it had been scarred and broken by hostile bullets. There was even something about it to suggest that ancient, living romance of theirs; for the front yard was filled with hollyhocks, and the house itself had that look of clean brightness about it that only the hand of a woman can give. Six or seven years ago they had adopted Annette?when Annette had found all other doors shut against her, more or less; likewise Annette's baby, who had since grown up to be one of the brightest little girls in the village, Celeste?honorary granddaughter to both of them. But, in spite of the honor and love th...