"I believed my house would not be burned. It was the house where the German Emperor William the First spent four days in 1870. It was the house where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped out the plan of Sedan. You see it was the finest house in this part of France. Each year since 1871, three or four German officers have come to visit it, taking photographs of it, because of the part it played in their history. I was sure it would not be burned by them. "I left all my things in it--the silverware, the little trinkets and souvenirs, handed down in my family, and gathered through my lifetime. I said to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a deserted house. I will show them we are living there, with everything in sight. I was working through the day at the hospital, caring for the German wounded. "The soldiers began their burning with the house of a watchmaker. They burned my house. I saw it destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau). I saw my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room, and the dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the bibelots, everything that was dear to me, everything that time had brought me, was burned. "I said to the German doctor that it was very hard. "He replied: 'If I had known it was Madame's house, I should have ordered it to be spared.'" We were silent for a moment. Then Madame Jacquemet said: "Come and see what we have now." She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds nearly filled. "All that I own I keep under the beds," she explained. "See, there are two chairs, two beds. Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room." "Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a German officer, after the village was in ruins. "We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It was French shells that destroyed it." "I was here," I answered. "There were no French shells." "The village people fired on our troops," he said. "I was here," I told him. "The village people did not fire on your troops. The village people ran away." "An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he explained. The Mayor took up the story. "A German officer took me into his room, one day," he said. "He closed the door, and began: "I am French at heart. I believe that your village was burned as a spectacle for the Crown Prince who has his headquarters over yonder at a village a few kilometers away." The picture he summoned was so vivid that I said, "Nero--Nero, for whom the destruction of a city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is a little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose and convincing." Monsieur Jacquemet went on: