ct silence, until it was five minutes past twelve, and then said,
"General, depuis cinq minutes votre aureole baisse." Boulanger went out
by a side door, leaving his friends--disappointed and furious--to
announce to the waiting crowd that the General had gone home. He could
certainly have got to the Elysee that night. How long he would have
stayed, and whom he would have put there, we shall never know.

MAREUIL, October 31st.

It has been a beautiful, warm, bright autumn day and, for a wonder, we
have had no frost yet, not even a white one, so that the garden is still
full of flowers, and all day the village children have been
coming--begging for some to decorate the graves for to-morrow. I went in
to the churchyard this afternoon, which was filled with women and
children--looking after their dead. It is not very pretty--our little
churchyard--part of a field enclosed on the slope of the hill, not many
trees, a few tall poplars and a laurel hedge--but there is a fine open
view over the great fields and woods--always the dark blue line of the
forest in the distance. They are mostly humble graves--small farmers and
peasants--but I fancy they must sleep very peacefully in the fields they
have worked in all their lives--full of poppies and cornflowers in
summer and a soft gold brown in the autumn, when the last crops are cut
and the hares run wild over the hills.

I think these two days--the "Toussaint" and the "Jour des Morts"--are
the two I like best in the Catholic Church, and certainly they are the
only ones, in our part of the world, when the churches are full. I
walked about some little time looking at all the preparations. Every
grave had some flowers (sometimes only a faded bunch of the last field
flowers) except one, where there were no flowers, but a little border of
moss all around and a slip of pasteboard on a stick stuck into the
ground with "a ma Mere" written on it. All the graves are very simple,
generally a plain white cross with headstone and name. One or two of the
rich farmers had something rather more important--a slab of marble, or a
broken column when it was a child's grave, and were more ambitious in
the way of flowers and green plants, but no show of any kind--none of
the terrible bead wreaths one sees in large cities.

There was a poor old woman, nearly bent double, leaning on a stick,
standing at one of the very modest graves; a child about six years old
with her, with a bunch of flowers in a