ow--I mean, a
frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her
nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or
hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by
enquiring if "_les coeurs d'Arras_" had a history. Nobody else had
ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of
the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away,
she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It
went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under
La Grande Place was honeycombed with such _souterrains_, she said.
They'd once been quarries, in days so old as to be forgotten--quarries
of "tender stone" (what a nice expression!), and the people of Arras had
cemented and made them habitable in case of bombardment. They must have
been useful in 1914!

As for the cakes, they were invented by an abbess who was sent to Spain.
Before reluctantly departing, she gave the recipe to her successor,
saying she "left her heart in Arras." According to the legend (the old
shop-lady assured me) a girl who had never loved was certain to fall in
love within a month after first eating a Heart of Arras. Well, Padre, I
ate almost a hundred hearts, and less than a month after I met Jim!

You may believe that I asked Brian and Father Beckett a dozen questions
at once about dear Arras. But alas, alas! all the answers were sad.

The beautiful belfry? Only a phantom remaining. The Hotel de Ville?
Smashed. La Grande Place--La Petite Place? Stone quarries above ground
as well as below, the old Flemish facades crumbled like sheets of barley
sugar. The arcades? Ruined. The charming old shops? Vanished. The seller
of Hearts? Dead. But the Hearts--_they_ still existed! The children of
Arras who have come back "since the worst was over" (that is their way
of putting it!) would not feel that life was life without the Arras
Hearts. Besides, Arras without the Hearts would be like the Altar of the
Vestal Virgins without the ever-burning lamp. So they are still baked,
and still eaten, those brave little Hearts of Arras--and Brian asked
Father Beckett to bring me a box.

They bought it of a cousin of my old woman, an ancient man who had
lurked in a cellar during the whole of the bombardment. He said that all
Arras knew, in September, 1914, how the Kaiser had vowed to march into
the town in triumph, and how, when he found the place as hard to ta