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Updated: June 1, 2025
When they reached the landing that lay between their rooms, Genestas set down his candle on the window ledge and turned towards Benassis. "Tonnerre de Dieu!" he said, with outspoken enthusiasm; "I cannot let you go without telling you that you are the third among christened men to make me understand that there is Something up there," and he pointed to the sky.
Pray for him," said Genestas, making a few playful cuts at the children with his riding-whip. The old woman and her little charges went out with him; they watched him mount his horse and ride away. He followed the road along the valley until he reached the bridle-path that led to La Fosseuse's cottage. From the slope above the house he saw that the door was fastened and the shutters closed.
"I am not likely to want anything, however small, it seems to me," exclaimed Genestas. "There is even a boot-jack. Only an old trooper knows what a boot-jack is worth! There are times, when one is out on a campaign, sir, when one is ready to burn down a house to come by a knave of a boot-jack.
Look! there is the rustic monument which has been erected to his memory." Genestas saw a mound of earth about twenty feet high. It was bare as yet, but dwellers in the district were already busily covering the sloping sides with green turf.
The doctor called to his friend, and they went back along the foot-path. "Is that little peasant consumptive?" asked Genestas. "Mon Dieu! yes," answered Benassis. "Science cannot save him, unless Nature works a miracle. Our professors at the Ecole de Medecine in Paris often used to speak to us of the phenomenon which you have just witnessed.
"Now, then, be good, my pets! If one did not look after them," she went on, looking at Genestas, "they would eat up the whole lot of prunes, the madcaps!" Then she seated herself on a three-legged stool, drew the little weakling between her knees, and began to comb and wash his head with a woman's skill and with motherly assiduity. The four small thieves hung about.
The miller's lad was sitting on some sacks of corn near the door of the house. Genestas asked for M. Benassis. "M. Benassis went over there," said the miller, pointing out one of the ruined cottages. "Has the village been burned down?" asked the commandant. "No, sir." "Then how did it come to be in this state?" inquired Genestas.
"Do not call me Captain Bluteau," cried Genestas, breaking in upon the doctor, and springing to his feet with sudden energy, a change of position that seemed to be prompted by inward dissatisfaction of some kind. "There is no such person as Captain Bluteau.... I am a scoundrel!"
Benassis pressed his knees against his horse's sides, and swept ahead of Commandant Genestas, as if he shrank from continuing this conversation any further. When their horses were once more cantering abreast of each other, he spoke again: "Nature has created this poor girl for sorrow," he said, "as she has created other women for joy.
On the farther bank of the river, at the foot of a mountain, with a faint red glow of sunset upon its highest crest, Genestas caught a glimpse of a dozen deserted cottages.
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