When we came out a pale white moon had arisen over some black cedars planted near the door, and as we walked slowly back, saluted by blue-clad men, or standing aside to let munition-wagons rattle by, Laferrière told me of some of the glorious deeds of his comrades of the _popote_, though no word of himself. In the Place du Chapitre the populace was already gathered about the fountain of the stone flame. It was like looking at an old print, recording old victories and old rejoicings, together with the eternal hope of the people that new victories, unlike the old, may mean new things for them. I felt through my single being the surge of the generations, and against my hand the beat of the changeless human heart, forever quickened or retarded by the same things. Loving, hating, desiring, forgetting, and finally relinquishing its beat, because it must. Though I remembered that in all times there are men who prefer something else to life.... In the evening Madame Mény gave a great dinner for the officers of the Mission, to which I was also bidden. Madame Mény is the daughter of Madame Chagué and lives next door to her mother in an ancestral home with high, sloping roof and deep windows, giving on the Place du Marché, overlooking the fountain, which I can’t see from my window. The officers wore all their decorations and even gloves, and I felt as a wren might feel among the birds of paradise, and I wished again that I had brought a good dress and something sparkling for my breast. When dinner was half through came Captain Bacquart from Paris, belated on that Belfort train, still at its old tricks. He was slightly condescending, as one might be coming from the City of Light to the dusky provinces, but everything he had to tell, even the things he had heard in the greatest solemnity from Ministers of State, had been grabbed by the Mission out of the air before he left Paris, and in addition everybody knew a lot of things he didn’t know, that had happened while he was on the way. But we did smile at the story of the routing out of a station-master, whose trust was train-schedules and lost articles rather than events, to be asked whether he knew if the armistice had been signed, by the species every station-master hates even in peace-times—that is to say, travelers—and “_Saperlotte!_” and “_Nom de Dieu!_” rose to the station vault when he found that _that_ was what they wanted him for!