Odette went away disconcerted. Not a word had been said about her Jean, who also had died heroically. But what had they said about the other hero, Commandant de Blauve, whose death had brought her there? Men disappear; they are replaced; a memory of them remains, which is henceforth called "honor," and which does not admit of emotion. That was precisely what certain of her friends had already said to her. They had seemed to know that in advance, but Odette--no. She thought, as she returned home, of that bloody sunset over the sea, upon which she had gazed at Surville on August I, and during which she had had the impression that she was entering a new world. She found three letters in the vestibule; one, belated, from a friend in the country, who had only just heard of the death of Lieutenant Jacquelin, and who "complimented" her, basing her consolation upon "the honor with which she saw her adorned." The others were from strangers charged to announce to her that the husband of a friend who lived in Versailles, and that of another in Bourg-la-Reine, had just been killed. Odette sank down upon the divan, her head feeling bruised as if she had bumped it against the wall; killed, killed--then there were dead men everywhere? And she felt a dark rancor toward all those fatal events that fell upon her so furiously to disturb her grief, her personal grief. She saw again those three men of whose loss she had been told that very day--in a single half-day--Commandant de Blauve, a magnificent man, a man without a blot, "a type of Plutarch" as he had been called, always with the added words, "characters such as his were no longer made"; then Jacques Graveur, him of Versailles, a good comrade of Jean's, one who never made an ado about anything, and passed for none too serious; it appeared that he had saved his whole company by coolness and the sacrifice of himself; Louis Silvain, he of Bourg-la-Reine, had brought his captain in upon his shoulders, across two hundred metres of open ground under a hail of grape-shot, had come within three metres of his trench, when a ball passed through his body--but the officer was saved. He had been, in ordinary life, a big fellow, with no other occupation than to haunt the theatres, play at the races, and drink cocktails at the bars.... Such different figures, suddenly united in a similar act, for which some of them had from all time been prepared, the others not at all--the strangeness, the incomprehensibility of it all! She must write letters of condolence--she, who had received so many! While she was writing to the others she was thinking especially of her Jean; she felt a certain fascination in writing of grief; she dwelt upon it too much at length; it would be apparent to the wives to whom she wrote that she was thinking only of herself.... But each of them would have done the same, and would forgive her.