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Updated: June 8, 2025
"Marengo!" murmured Reine Allix, thinking of that far-off time in her dim youth when the horseman had flown through the dusky street and the bonfire had blazed on the highest hill above the river. "Bread will be dear," muttered Mathurin, the miller, going onward with his foot-weary mule. Bernadou stood silent, with his roses dry and thirsty round him.
They saw all this, and had to stand by with mute tongues and passive hands, lest any glance of wrath or gesture of revenge should bring the leaden bullets in their children's throats or the yellow flame amidst their homesteads. Greater agony the world cannot hold. The chief characters are the peasant Bernadou, his wife Margot, and his old grandmother Reine Allix.
Salvette feels the gathering haste, the mystery of a religious feast crossing the hours of sleep, the hanging forth in the dark village of the blind light of lanterns and the illumination of the windows of the church. "Are you asleep, Bernadou?"
The little houses on either side the road were dark, for the dwellers in them dared not show any light that might be a star to allure to them the footsteps of their foes. Bernadou sat with his arms on the table, and his head resting on them. Margot nursed her son. Reine Allix prayed.
But there was a little quiver about her firm-set mouth, and her aged head was bent over the primroses. She had foreseen it; she was glad of it; and yet for the instant it was a pang to her. "I am very thankful," said Bernadou, with a flash of joy on his face.
All at once, at the last couplet, when the shepherds, coming to see Jesus in His stable, have placed in the manger their offerings of fresh eggs and cheeses, and when, bowing with an affable air, all at once poor Bernadou slipped and fell heavily on the pillow. His comrade thought he had fallen asleep, and called him, shook him.
"Why art thou sad?" whispered Margot, with wistful eyes. "Thou art exempt from war service, my love?" Bernadou shook his head. "The poor will suffer somehow," was all he answered. Yet to him, as to all the Berceau, the news was not very terrible, because it was so vague and distant an evil so far off and shapeless.
With all her strength she had begun to drag the body of Bernadou across the threshold of his house. "He shall lie at home, he shall lie at home," she muttered. She would not believe that already he was dead.
Only Reine Allix looked up to the hill above the river and murmured, "When we lit the bonfire there, Claudis lay dead;" and Bernadou, standing musing among his roses, said, with a smile that was very grave, "Margot, see here! When Picot shouted, 'A Berlin! he trod on my Gloire de Dijon rose and killed it."
And Salvette lifts him up with the tenderness of a mother. He fills the goblets, cuts the bread, and then they drink and talk of Provençe. Little by little Bernadou grows animated and moved by the occasion, the white wine, the remembrances! With that child-like manner which the sick find in the depths of their feebleness he asks Salvette to sing a Provençal Noël.
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