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Updated: May 1, 2025
An hour after this I was marching, with two other men and Gabord, to the Convent of the Ursulines, dressed in the ordinary costume of a French soldier, got from the wife of Jean Labrouk. In manner and speech though I was somewhat dull, my fellows thought, I was enough like a peasant soldier to deceive them, and my French was more fluent than their own.
That evening, at eight o'clock, Jean Labrouk was buried. A shell had burst not a dozen paces from his own door, within the consecrated ground of the cathedral, and in a hole it had made he was laid, the only mourners his wife and his grandfather, and two soldiers of his company sent by General Bougainville to bury him. I watched the ceremony from my loft, which had one small dormer window.
Tell"...he sank back, but raised himself, and continued: "Tell my Babette I weep with her.... Ah, mon grand homme de Calvaire bon soir!" He sank back again, but I roused him with one question more, vital to me. I must have the countersign. "Labrouk! Labrouk!" said I sharply. He opened his dull, glazed eyes. "Qui va la?" said I, and I waited anxiously.
She turned round, and went and sat down beside the old man, looked into his face for a minute silently, and then said, "Grandfather, Jean is dead; our Jean is dead." The old man peered at her for a moment, then broke into a strange laugh, which had in it the reflection of a distant misery, and said, "Our little Jean, our little Jean Labrouk! Ha! ha!
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