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"He might have shot you, but he pardons you and yet you people say that we are savages!" . . . With involuntary contempt, he further explained that he had conducted him thither fully expecting that he would be shot. The General was planning to punish all the prominent residents of Villeblanche, and he had inferred, on his own initiative, that the owner of the castle must be one of them.
He then retraced his steps, calling out before the least injured houses, and putting his head through the doors and windows that were unobstructed or but half consumed. Was nobody left in Villeblanche?
The village was going to be burned. It was necessary to avenge the four German dead lying on the outskirts of Villeblanche, near the barricade. The mayor, the priest, the principal inhabitants would all be shot. By the time they reached the top floor Desnoyers could see floating above the boughs of his park dark clouds whose outlines were reddened by the sun.
At that time, the goods of German residents, seized by the government, were being auctioned off; a felicitous retaliation for the enforced journey which the fittings of the castle of Villeblanche had taken on the road to Berlin; but the agents told him in vain of the few competitors which he would now meet. He no longer felt attracted by these extraordinary bargains.
How could he ever live again in that tragic community composed mostly of his enemies? . . . Farewell forever, castle of Villeblanche! He turned his steps toward Paris, planning to get there the best way he could. He came upon corpses everywhere, but they were not all the gray-green uniform. Many of his countrymen had fallen in the gallant offensive.
And a people with laws could wage war in this fashion, like a tribe of Indians going to combat in order to rob! . . . His adoration of property rights made him beside himself with wrath at these sacrileges. He began to worry about his castle at Villeblanche. All that he owned in Paris suddenly seemed to him of slight importance to what he had in his historic mansion.
Their intention was to follow on, to join the column, but on entering the village they looked at the houses with supplicating eyes, desiring to enter them, feeling such a craving for immediate relief that they forgot even the nearness of the enemy. Villeblanche was now more military than before the arrival of the troops.
Don Marcelo was fleeing to take refuge in his castle when he met the mayor of Villeblanche. The noise of the firing had made him hurry to the barricade. When he learned of the apparition of the group of stragglers he threw up his hands in despair. They were crazy. Their resistance was going to be fatal for the village, and he ran on to beg them to cease.
Four hours later, on descending one of the hills that bounded the valley of the Marne, he saw afar the roofs of Villeblanche clustered around the church, and further on, beyond a little grove, the slatey points of the round towers of his castle. The streets of the village were deserted.
"Useless as a drone, and as dangerous, too," fretted his father. And yet in the back of his troubled mind fluttered an irresistible satisfaction an animal pride in the thought that this hare-brained terror was his own. For a while, he thought that he had hit upon a way of withdrawing his son from such an existence. The relatives in Berlin had visited the Desnoyers in their castle of Villeblanche.
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