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While M. de Boiscoran knocked at the door, a little peasant-girl passed by, and told him that she had just met the priest at a place called the Marshalls' Cross-roads. As the parsonage stands quite isolated, at the end of the village, such an incident is very probable.
History, indeed, contains few chapters more strange, more seemingly impossible, than this which tells the story of the maid-of-all-work the red-armed, illiterate peasant-girl who, without any dower of beauty or charm, won the idolatry of an Emperor and succeeded him on the greatest throne of Europe.
That behaviour, which is usually the result of a good education and a long experience of society, was in the lovely peasant-girl due only to a candid and well-balanced mind which shone all the more because it was all nature and not art. As they returned from the church, Charles and Christine knelt down before the young wife's mother, who gave them her blessing with tears of joy.
With the three sons of Philip who successively became kings of France, the direct line of the Capetian dynasty ends: with the accession of Philip VI. in 1328, the house of Valois opens the sad century of the English wars a period of humiliation and defeat, of rebellious and treacherous princes, civil strife, famine and plague, illumined only by the heroism of a peasant-girl, who, when king and nobles were sunk in shameless apathy or sullen despair, saved France from utter extinction.
In Jeanne, Madame Sand had first ventured to make a peasant-girl the central figure of her novel, though still so far deferring to the received notions of what was essential in order to interest the "gentle" reader as to surround her simple heroine with personages of rank and education.
For a moment, his thought ran back to a sunny hillside near to the old town of Arles, where lines of stunted, tawny olives crept down the fields, where fig-trees showed their purple nodules of fruit, where a bright-faced young peasant-girl, with a gay kerchief turbaned about her head with a coquettish tie, lay basking in the sunshine.
I always meant well by thee; and even now, if I thought thou wouldst repent truly, poor Sidonia, I would take thee with me to the castle of Saatzig, and never let thee want for aught through life." When Sidonia heard this, she wept, and promised amendment. Only let Clara try her, for she could never go to Zachow and play the peasant-girl.
I was ringing the third or fourth time in vain, when a little peasant-girl came by, who told me that she had just met the priest at the Marshalls' Cross-roads. I thought at once I would go and meet him, and went in that direction. But I walked more than four miles without meeting him. I thought the girl must have been mistaken, and went home again. P. Is that your explanation? A. Yes.
For instance, it seems as if no woman could habitually walk uninjured with a weight of twelve pounds of skirts suspended at her hips, Dr. Coale is responsible for the statistics, and as if salvation must therefore lie in shoulder-straps. Yet the practice cannot be sheer suicide, when the Dutch peasant-girl plods bloomingly through her daily duties beneath a dozen successive involucres of flannel.
With the help of the strong peasant-girl, the emperor arose and stood erect. But he complained of dizziness, and would have Marianne to sustain him. She approached with a smile, while he, drawing her gently to his side, looked into her eyes. The poor girl trembled, she knew not why, for assuredly she was not afraid. Kathi, who had gone back for the horse, now came up, leading him to his master.
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