—You see, says Goudeloup, I am ready for them . . . If they leave me alone, I shall not stir . . . But if they are imprudent enough to meddle with the farm . . . Let them beware! [Picture: The shattered Champrosay bridge] We were talking in low tones, as if in an enemy’s country. He let me have a few loaves and a sack of flour; then having loaded my cart, we parted, promising each other soon to meet again, . . . Poor man! Before returning home, no traces of Prussians being visible, I was tempted to go down the lane which passes under the walls of the farm and leads to the Seine. It was the whim of an artist. A river is the soul of a landscape. Animating the scene with its ceaseless movement, it gives life to all the changes of the day, and imparts grandeur to Nature by the reflection of its mirrored banks, and of glowing sunsets sinking into tranquil depths of liquid fire. Now its water faithfully reflects the surrounding melancholy. The shattered bridge, the crumbling piers piled up on either side in white heaps of stone, the iron chains dangling in the river, all this seems like a great rent in the landscape, the cruel work of the invader. No boats, no rafts—the river has returned to its wild, natural state, its surface furrowed by unfettered currents and swirling pools eddying round the ruins of the broken bridge, and bearing on its way nothing but drifting tufts of grass and roots, on which the water-wagtail, wearied out with its long flight, abandons itself to the course of the stream. On the slopes of each bank the corn and vines still stand, and the newly-mown fields are yet overshadowed by the high haycocks; a whole harvest lost and left to its fate . . .