—Take care, Mr. Robert; do not show yourself. There is at the _Commandatur_ a list of the inhabitants who have remained in the country, and we are all closely watched. After eight o’clock in the evening, nobody except myself is allowed to go outside their house . . . So many Prussians have been murdered in the neighbourhood! Draveil pays the penalty. Their requisitions are three times heavier here than elsewhere. The least word, and they imprison; the slightest show of rebellion, and they shoot. Our unhappy peasants are terrified. They spy and inform about each other; and if one of them perceived that I was hiding some one in my house, he would be capable—to spare himself a requisition—of warning the _Commandatur_. What would be the fate of both of us, I can easily imagine . . . He was so afraid of any imprudence on my part, poor dear Doctor, that all the time I stayed in his house he kept the key of my room in his pocket. The latticed shutters and closed windows threw a prison gloom over my room, that only gave me light enough to read by. I had medical works, a few odd volumes translated from the Panckoucke series, and from time to time a copy of a French paper published by the Prussians at Versailles. That also was written in a foreign kind of French, and our real or imaginary defeats were sneeringly described with coarse and stupid jokes. When I could no longer read, I looked out through the blinds into the street—the real old-fashioned street of a country town. Straight rows of houses with little gardens and a pavement in front, the spaces between them filled with a trellis-work of branches, or the trunk of a great elm, and a background of plain and vineyard scarcely hidden by the low roofs. Then sheds and stables, a fountain spouting out of an old wall, the large gateway of a farm, side by side with the notary’s white and clean little house, ornamented with escutcheons. And over all the cruel blight of the invasion. Knitted jerseys drying on the iron gates and on the shutters. Large pipes protruding from every window, and military boots. Never had I heard the sound of so many boots . . . Opposite my window was the _Commandatur_. Every day peasants were brought in, urged along by butt-ends of rifles or the scabbards of swords. The women and children followed weeping, and while the man was dragged inside, they remained at the door explaining their case to the soldiers, who, with closed lips, listened disdainfully or else laughed with a stupid brutal laughter. No hope of pity or justice. All depended on the caprice of the conqueror. They were so well aware of it, these unfortunate peasants, that they hardly dared stir out or show themselves, and when they did venture into the street, it was heart-rending to see them creeping under the walls, glancing out of the corner of their eyes, bowed down, obsequious and servile, like Eastern Jews.