“Ah, M’sieu, but it is terrible. I give to the Ordonnances my fire, my cook-pots, and a bed of good hay in the stable, next to the cows, and what do they do? M’sieu, they steal my gate that was put there by my grandfather--he who won a decoration in soixante et six--and they get a little axe and make of it fire-wood! And in the early morning they milk the cows. Ah, but, M’sieu, I will go to the Maire and make a réclammation! Fifteen francs for a new gate, and seventeen sous for the milk that they have stolen! And the cuillers! Before the war I buy a new set, with Henri, of twenty-four cuillers. Where are they? All but three are volées, M’sieu! It is not juste. M’sieu le Capitaine who was here a week ago last Dimanche--for I went to Mass--say it is a dam shame, M’sieu. I do not like to make the trouble, M’sieu, but I must live. La veuve Marnot over yonder, two houses down the street on the left-hand side, she could have a hundred gates burned and say nothing. She is très riche. They say the Mayor make déjà his advances. But me, what shall I do, my gate a desecration in the stoves, M’sieu, and the milk of my cows drunk by the maudits ordonnances!” Note in the mess president’s accounts: “To one gate (burned) and milk stolen, 7.50 francs.” All over France and Belgium little stores have grown and flourished. They sell tinned goods without limit, from cigarettes, through lobster, to peaches. Both are practical countries. In nearly all these boutiques there is a pretty girl. Both nations have learned the commercial value of a pretty girl. It increases the credit side of the business 75 per cent. In the Estaminets it is the same, only more so. Their turnover is a thing which will be spoken of by their great-grandchildren with bated breath. More cases than one are known where the lonely soldier has made a proposal, in form, to the fair débitante who nightly handed him his beer over the bar of a little Estaminet. Sometimes he has been accepted pour l’amour de sa cassette--sometimes “pour l’amour de ses beaux yeux!” In a little hamlet several days’ march behind the firing-line, lived a widow. She was a grass-widow before Verdun, and there she became “veuve.” She was a tall, handsome woman, twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps, and her small feet and ankles, the proud carriage of her head, and the delicate aquiline nose bespoke her above the peasantry. She kept a little café at the junction of three cross-roads. The natives know her as Madame de Maupin. Why “de” you ask? Because her father was a French count and her mother was a femme de chambre. The affair made an esclandre of some magnitude many years ago. Madame de Maupin was fille naturelle. She married, at the wishes of her old harridan of a mother, a labourer of the village. She despised her husband. He was uncouth and a peasant. In her the cloven hoof showed little. Despite no advantages of education she had the instincts of her aristocratic father. The natives disliked her for that reason.