Not that I'm her
type at all, judging from portraits! However, I fancied myself intensely
in the finished picture, and used to hope I should be recognized when I
strolled into the Academy. But I never was.
Looking down over the plain of Picardy, I pretended to myself that I
could see the Queen's procession: Marguerite (looking as much as
possible like me!) in her gold and crystal coach, lined with
rose-coloured Spanish velvet, jewel-broidered: the gentlemen outriders
trying to stare through the thick panes obscured with designs and
mottoes concerning the sun and its influence upon human fate; the
high-born girls chattering to each other from their embroidered Spanish
saddles, as they rode on white palfreys, trailing after the glittering
coach; and the dust rising like smoke from wheels of jolting chariots
which held the elder women of the Court.
Oh, those were great days, the days of Henry of Navarre and his naughty
wife! But, after all, there wasn't as much chivalry and real romance in
Picardy then, or in the time of St. Quentin himself, as war has brought
back to it now. No deeds we can find in history equal the deeds of
to-day!
* * * * *
We got lost going home, somehow taking the wrong road, straying into a
wood, plunging and bumping down and down over fearful roads, and
landing--by what might have been a bad accident--in a deep ravine almost
too strange to be true.
Even our French officer couldn't make out what had happened to us, or
whither we'd wandered, until we'd stopped, and our blaze of acetylene
had lighted up a series of fantastic caverns in the rock (caverns
improved up to date by German cement) and in front of that honeycombed
gray wall a flat, grassy lawn that was a graveyard.
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