Diane was a little way off,--it was no sight for a woman,--but at that moment she entered the garden in the dusk, carrying something in her hand.
“Here,” she said, “is something in which to wrap François. I went to the officer commanding at the jail, and told him that François was a soldier of France who had died bravely, and that he was entitled to have the tricolor laid upon him dead.”
It was a small flag, such as batteries of artillery carry in case they should lose or be separated from their colors.
Diane, kneeling on the ground, wrapped François’ body in it, and then leaned over and kissed his dead face.
There was a little half-wrecked church in the neighborhood, and there François was carried by the soldiers, with the jailer and Jean assisting, and followed by the Bishop. They laid him down on the pavement before the desecrated altar, and there Jean watched by him the whole night through.
The church was dark, although the windows were broken out and a shell had made a great gaping hole in the roof, but the light of the moon and the stars was quenched by the great pall of smoke that enveloped the vast city.
Occasionally Jean would rise and go near the altar and look down at François, mute and meek, for even François le Bourgeois was meek in death.
Jean’s memory, travelling back slowly but accurately to the beginning of things, recalled that François had loved Diane from the first, but had been clever enough to keep the preposterous thing to himself. Well, François was ever a mystery and a contradiction, and so his death contradicted his whole life, and atoned for it.
Two weeks later, on a beautiful June morning, the Bishop had what was left of François le Bourgeois interred close to the walls of the little old cathedral of Bienville.
“Because,” said the Bishop, to Diane and Jean Leroux, who were present, “when I die, they will put me in the church on the other side of the wall, and I think I should like to be near François, for, to tell you the truth, I loved him better than I ever acknowledged. He was such an amusing fellow, you know, and I had known him when he was the child of greatness and I was the boy who tended the cows. François and I, having been together in our boyhood, will be close together at the end, and I am sure when the last trump sounds, François will rise with a joke upon his lips; otherwise, it would not be François at all.”