“But no. Eight only. Since the Americans came to town all the women have deserted the factory in order to wash the Americans’ clothes.” Monsieur, it appears, is a wood-cutter by profession. He comes home from a hard day’s chopping looking like a genus of the woods himself with his worn brown velour suit, his wrinkled brown skin and his ragged brown beard which resembles exactly those bundles of fine twigs which the French burn in their fireplaces. When Monsieur was ten years old the Germans occupied the town and sixteen of them slept in this very room. They were perfect pigs, he says, and ate everything they could lay their hands on; “But,” he adds, “they didn’t like our bread!” Sunday mornings all the men in town, including the Man With One Leg, and all the dogs start off together, the men armed with guns and each carrying a musette bag or knapsack. Papa puts on his shooting coat with the fancy buttons each depicting a different bird or beast of the chase, takes down his old shot-gun from the wall, and joins them. At dusk they come back again, empty-handed, but seemingly well content. Their modus operandi, I gather, is to proceed to a comfortable spot in the woods, then all sit down, drink vin rouge and wait for the game. Indeed one doughboy declares, that passing by one of those open alleys which intersect the forests here, he once saw an old Frenchman standing with his gun in a drizzling rain, patiently waiting for a shot while by his side stood another “old frog” holding an umbrella over him. Goncourt, February 14. The woman who lives in the House of the Madonna is an unconscionable old scalawag. Not that you would ever suspect it to look at her, for with her round rosy face, her smooth parted hair and her comfortably rotund figure she resembles nothing so much as somebody’s genial and respected grandmother. Yet the facts in the case remain. She sells doped wine to the soldiers at ruinous prices and she sells at forbidden hours. Moreover we have reason to suspect that at odd times she carries on an utterly illicit commerce. According to our hostess, when the time from the last pay day grows too long, certain soldiers are not above smuggling in their extra shoes and shirts to her, and she pays them back in drinks. This morning while I was at breakfast she came bouncing in and proceeded to fill the house with lamentations. Last night a tipsy soldier had stolen the key to her front door! Then she delved into history for my benefit, recounting how, some weeks before, two soldiers, having sent her out of the room on an errand, had proceeded to rob her till, the sum amounting to almost three hundred francs! “_Oh! Ils sont des monstres, des cochons!_” she wailed.