A steep, dusty road goes up past outbuildings of the hospital, workshops, and yards, where there were some green things growing, and at the top there were a lot of our soldiers waiting at the door of a low, long house. My poor little hobbling, lopsided blue soldiers, with their bandages and slings and canes and crutches! I think they are so beautiful.
The doors of the house were open. Up two steps, and there were the father and mother, in their black silk and satin, standing beside the boy. They were perfectly quiet. The strange thing about the grief one sees in these days, everywhere, is that always it is so perfectly quiet. The boy looked just as one had seen him so often, sleeping, with his almond eyes closed. Only there was no fever in his cheeks any more.
The black hearse came up the road with several croquemorts and eight Republican Guards; they had two crossed palms for the boy, and the flag to cover him, and the black wooden cross that was to mark his grave.
We followed down the road and across the courts and out of the hospital gates.
The Sunday morning market was busy and noisy outside in the street, but a silence seemed to form itself around us as we went between the barrows and booths of summer country things. Then we went along a wide avenue that was empty, where the sound of the wheels of the hearse and of the horses' hoofs seemed solemn and monotonous, and as if it were something that never would cease. The boy's father and mother trudged ahead sturdily, with the strong gait of peasants from the fields, and my wounded dragged along, already tired. It was a long way from the hospital to the church.
There were many people in the street of the church, and on the church steps, and the church inside was crowded. It is the church of an irreligious quarter, but it was crowded.
A big Suisse with his mace led us along the aisle, through the throng of people who stood back from us, to the chapel of Our Lady, behind the high altar. Many of the Suisses of the churches of this quarter are gendarmes, needed because the roughs who come into the church would often make disturbance. The big Suisse had the air of a gendarme, ordering us.
But now the boy's mother and father were in a place they understood. There was no need to order them. They knew just what to do. They had been uncertain elsewhere, timid and bewildered, in the hospital, in the streets, but in the church they were at home.