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Updated: June 21, 2025
All that I see which actually reminds me of the war now that we are used to the absence of the men I see on the route nationale, when I drive down to Couilly. Across the fields it is a short and pretty walk. Amélie makes it in twenty minutes. I could, if it were not for climbing that terrible hill to get back. Besides, the mud is inches deep.
Esbly evacuated, Couilly evacuated, Quincy evacuated. All the shops closed. No government, no post-office, and absolutely no knowledge of what had happened since Wednesday. I had a horrible sense of isolation. Luckily for me, part of the morning was killed by what might be called an incident or a disaster or a farce just as you look at it.
They waited until I shut the case, and replaced it in my bag and then: "You live alone?" one asked. I owned that I did. "But why?" "Well," I replied, "because I have no family here." "You have no domestic?" I explained that I had a femme de ménage. "Where is she?" I said that at that moment she was probably at Couilly, but that ordinarily when she was not here, she was at her own home.
"We thought you were calling Dick." The joke was on me. When I explained that I wanted some fresh bread to toast and was not allowed to go to their house in Couilly for it, it ceased to be a joke at all. It was useless for me to laugh, and to explain that an order was an order, and that Couilly was Couilly, whether it was at my gate or down the hill. Père's anger was funnier than my joke.
There is a crossroad just above my house, which commands the valley on either side, and leads to a little hamlet on the route nationale from Couilly to Meaux, arid is called "La Demi-Lune" why "Half-Moon" I don't know. It was there, on the 6th, that I saw, for the first time, an armed barricade.
If it had not been for the one lamp on my little cart waiting in the road, I could not have seen where the exit at Couilly was. It was not gay, and it was far from gay climbing the long hill, with the feeble rays of that one lamp to light the blackness. Luckily Ninette knows the road in the dark.
I amused myself last week by defying the consign. I had not seen a gendarme on the road for weeks. I had driven to Couilly once or twice, though to do it I had to cross "the dead line." I had met the garde champêtre there, and even talked to him, and he had said nothing.
Couilly itself is charming. The canal, winding its way between thick lines of poplar trees towards Meaux, you may follow in the hottest day of summer without fatigue.
Her surprise would have been greater still, had she witnessed the acquirements of these little Couilly girls, many of them, like herself, daughters of small peasant farmers.
Amélie carried it to Couilly and had it copied. Very few people would recognize me by it. It is the counterfeit presentment of a smiling, fat old lady, but it is absolutely réglementaire in size and form, and so will pass muster. I have seen some pretty queer portraits on civil papers.
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