This time the young wife had gone with him as far as Tours, to be with him a few hours longer and after that to receive his letters more promptly. How long the time had seemed, all alone in the Hôtel de l'Univers! And yet she had a pretty room! She had amused herself with piquing public curiosity on the Rue Nationale, with her little walking-suit of the latest cut, and her simple canoe hat--quite the "Parisienne on a holiday"--and the elegance of her manners, at once independent and circumspect, as were all her ways. It was generally agreed that she was pretty. Who was not asking questions about her in the hotel, at the restaurant? It had amused her to see a family of tourists inventing pretexts for changing places at their small table, this one in order to face her, that one in order that the grown-up son might not face her. And how they had stared at her! Telegrams had come from the sublieutenant. "Be at Pont-de-Piles to-morrow, darling," or "Ligueil, such a day for lunch," or "Loches, Hôtel de France, after breaking up." And she had sometimes waited a long while in wayside inns or beside dusty highways. Conversations at table began to come back to her. Every one had been talking of the manœuvres, discussing the names of generals, the communes that were being occupied. The presence of the President of the Republic was an event in the countryside. There had been old men who would consent to speak of nothing nearer than 1870; others, of fewer years, would recall the magnificent condition of the reconstituted army at the time of Gambetta's death, or at the period of the Schnaebele affair, when the country was so near to seeing it in action. A politician of the neighborhood--not more stupid, after all, than most of his contemporaries--rubicund, his eyes bloodshot at the end of dinner, had fallen foul of all these memories, regrets, would-be warlike emotions, and turned them upside down like eggs in a frying-pan. According to him, war was the scourge of bygone ages. France, the nation of progress, still consented to carry on a semblance of it, by way of facilitating necessary transitions, but it was a mere play of protocols, a final concession to the past. War was destructive; modern society was interested wholly in production; to believe in war was to turn back the clock of history. For that matter, every well-informed person was aware that scientific means of destruction had become such that a fratricidal conflict had been rendered impossible, im-pos-si-ble! One must be an idiot not to perceive that everything would be reduced to fragments in the twinkling of an eye. The manœuvres! ah, you made him laugh with your manœuvres! The manœuvres were no more like war than a toy pistol was like a German mortar. War, should it ever break out, would not last the time it would take to concentrate your army corps; the first of two adversaries who should be half a day ahead would bring the other to cry mercy.