The Recruit

"Oh! madame," said Brigitte, as she undressed her mistress, "must that man sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, and put on Monsieur Auguste's slippers, and eat the pate I made for Monsieur Auguste? They may guillotine me if I – "

"Brigitte!" cried Madame de Dey.

Brigitte was mute.

"Hush!" said her husband in her ear, "do you want to kill madame?"

At that moment the recruit made a noise in the room above by sitting down to his supper.

"I cannot stay here!" cried Madame de Dey. "I will go into the greenhouse; there I can hear what happens outside during the night."

She still floated between the fear of having lost her son and the hope of his suddenly appearing.

The night was horribly silent. There was one dreadful moment for the countess, when the battalion of recruits passed through the town, and went to their several billets. Every step, every sound, was a hope, – and a lost hope. After that the stillness continued. Towards morning the countess was obliged to return to her room. Brigitte, who watched her movements, was uneasy when she did not reappear, and entering the room she found her dead.

"She must have heard that recruit walking about Monsieur Auguste's room, and singing their damned Marseillaise, as if he were in a stable," cried Brigitte. "That was enough to kill her!"

The death of the countess had a far more solemn cause; it resulted, no doubt, from an awful vision. At the exact hour when Madame de Dey died at Carentan, her son was shot in the Morbihan. That tragic fact may be added to many recorded observations on sympathies that are known to ignore the laws of space: records which men of solitude are collecting with far-seeing curiosity, and which will some day serve as the basis of a new science for which, up to the present time, a man of genius has been lacking.