only support of a woman of ninety; he likewise had
never been half a dozen kilometres from his birthplace. When he was
bidden to vote, and he asked what his vote of assent would pledge him to
do, they told him, "It will bind you to honour your grandmother so long
as she shall live, and to get up with the lark, and to go to mass
every Sunday, and to be a loyal son to your country. Nothing more."
And thereat he had smiled and straightened his stalwart frame, and gone
right willingly to the voting-urn.

He was very stupid in these things; and Reine Allix, though clear-headed
and shrewd, was hardly more learned in them than he.

"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my babyhood there was
the old white flag upon the chateau. Well, they pulled that down and put
up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three colours.
Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one day and
set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was done that was
down again and the tricolour again up where it is. Now, some I know
fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of the flags;
but as for me, I could not see that any one of them mattered: bread
was just as dear and sleep was just as sweet whichever of the three was
uppermost."

Bernadou, who had never known but the flag of three colours, believed
her, as indeed he believed every word that those kindly and resolute old
lips ever uttered to him.

He had never been in a city, and only once, on the day of his first
communion, in the town four leagues away. He knew nothing more than this
simple, cleanly, honest life that he led. With what men did outside his
little world of meadow-land and woodland he had no care nor any concern.
Once a man had come through the village of the Berceau, a travelling
hawker of cheap prints,--a man with a wild eye and a restless
brain,--who told Bernadou that he was a downtrodden slave, a clod, a
beast like a mule, who fetched and carried that the rich might fatten,
a dolt, an idiot, who cared nothing for the rights of man and the wrongs
of the poor. Bernadou had listened with a perplexed face; then with
a smile, that had cleared it like sunlight, he had answered, in his
country dialect, "I do not know of what you speak. Rights? Wrongs? I
cannot tell, But I have never owned a sou; I have never told a lie; I
am strong enough to hold my own with any man that flouts me; and I am
content where I am. That is enoug