the troops went by, and of all her friends and kinsmen who were standing near her, and of the return of a cousin—a boy of sixteen years—starved, ragged, wearing a stove-pipe hat, and without shoes, of how the women wept and of the boy’s words of jesting and good-natured greeting, as he came to meet them.
Now, with the full rich accents of this unseen Frenchman, at once so strange and so familiar, all of the ancient life of France—her wars and histories, the great chronicles of her battles, and the brilliant and indestructible fabric of her life and energy through so many hundred years of victory and defeat, triumph and catastrophe—began to pulse with such a living and familiar warmth that it seemed to him as if the whole thing from the beginning had been compacted and resumed into the rich and sanguinary energies of this one Frenchman’s voice.
The man’s speech, a kind of furious and high-spirited repartee, carried on against all comers with an instant’s readiness, an animal vigour, that was almost like a national intoxication, was penetrated constantly by the exclamation “Parbleu!”
And more than anything else, it seemed to the youth, it was the tone and quality of that ancient exclamation, delivered with such a buoyant and animal vitality, that united the Frenchman to the distant past of his nation’s history, to millions of buried and forgotten lives, and through him, made that distant past blaze instantly with all the warmth and radiance of life again.
The Frenchman’s speech was lewd and ribald with the open and robust vulgarity of healthy country people; his broad jests were published without affectation in a tone loud enough for all the world to hear, and it was evident from the roars of hearty, sensual laughter with which his remarks were received by the soldiers, provincials, and strapping peasant women who were with him, that his audience was not a squeamish one.
The chief target for this robust fellow’s humour, to which he loudly returned with unwearied pertinacity, was that unfortunate man, the station-master, whose calling, for some reason, is provocative of unlimited mirth in France. Now, at every station, the Frenchman would publish to the world, amid roars of laughter, his narration of the station-master’s unhappy lot. In particular, he sang snatches of a ribald song entitled “Il est cocu le chef de gare”—which described movingly the trials of a station-master’s life, the cuckoldries to which the nature of
