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There was Chaumette, who yet was a mild man, popular, moderate, well-intentioned, and virtuous in the administration of the Commune; but he was an atheist! Conspirators, agents of the foreigner, such were all those sansculottes in red cap and carmagnole and sabots who recklessly outbid the Jacobins in patriotism.
Vain, futile effort! It was only the angry thundering of admitted helplessness. One chance in a million! The motors droned on, coming nearer and nearer. Excited townspeople, in wooden sabots, clattered down the streets seeking shelter; fear-stricken mothers and fathers spoke sharply to their little broods as they hustled them along.
The mother of nine, standing in the doorway of the green bandbox house, baby in arms, shrieked encouragement to her daughter. The Siren clattered after us with angrily ringing sabots, raging for money; the children cried; the friends shouted frank criticisms of our features, our hats, our manners.
The steep descent from the high plain overlooked the village. They came thronging in through the wooded glens of Praslay; by the Auberive road and the forests of Charbonniere; companions in hunting and social amusements, foresters and wearers of sabots, campers in the woods, inmates of the farms embedded in the forests none failed to answer the call.
Paul darkened the lamp by putting a piece of rubber over it, and when the profile of the peasant stood clear between him and the sky, he suddenly removed the rubber and turned, the light full on the man, at the same time sounding an unearthly blast on his bugle. The startled peasant uttered no sound; but the distant clinking of his sabots down the road, told how badly he was frightened.
And what strange objects, all blended and confused together! towers, towns, gateways, drawbridges, religious rites and processions, pealing organs and jangling chimes, long dusty roads lined with regimental trees, blouses, fishwomen's caps, sabots, savoury and unsavoury smells, France dissolving into Belgium, Belgium into France, France into Belgium again; in short, one bewildering kaleidoscope!
And in these fields were peasants in sabots at work, looking as though they had just stepped out of one of Millet's pictures. Even the haystacks and the scarecrows were different.
Even the exquisite church tower, which has the semblance of holding aloft a carved goblet of old silver, did not appeal to him as it would if he had not been preoccupied. And instead of laughing at the crowds of children who clattered after us, waking the clean and quiet streets with the ring of sabots, he let them get upon his nerves.
At the foot of the staircase, upon the white mats, beside the little sabots and tiny sandals which are always lying about in the vestibule, a great array of luggage is ready for departure, which I recognize at a glance pretty, dark robes, familiar to my sight, carefully folded and wrapped in blue towels tied at the four corners.
It was not the tap of a blind man's staff at first he thought it might be; it was not a donkey's foot on the cobbles; it was not the broom-sticks of the witches of St. Clement's Bay, for the rattle was below in the street, and the broom-stick rattle is heard only on the roofs as the witches fly across country from Rocbert to Bonne Nuit Bay. This clac-clac came from the sabots of some nightfarer.
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