'You know that Jules has not come back?' said Gilberte.
The old lady nodded. Since the beginning of the cannonade she had felt anxious, and had been watching for her son's return. She was, however, a brave mother. And now she remembered for what reason she had come upstairs. 'Your uncle, the colonel,' she said to her daughter-in-law, 'has sent us Major Bouroche with a note in pencil, asking if we will allow an ambulance to be installed here. He knows that we have plenty of room in the factory, and I have already placed the drying room and the courtyard at the gentlemen's disposal. Only, you ought to come down.'
'Oh! at once, at once!' said Henriette, stepping forward, 'we will help.'
Gilberte herself gave signs of emotion, and became quite enraptured with the idea of playing the nurse, which to her was a novel part. She barely took time to fasten a strip of lace over her hair, and the three women thereupon went down.
Scarcely had they reached the spacious porch, when, the gate being open, they saw that a crowd had assembled in the street. A low vehicle was slowly approaching, a kind of tilted cart drawn by one horse, which a lieutenant of Zouaves was leading. They at once thought that a wounded man was being brought to them.
But they learned that they were mistaken. The wounded man lying in the cart was Marshal MacMahon, whose left hip had been half carried away by a splinter of a shell, and who, after a first dressing at a gardener's little house, was now being taken to the Sub-Prefecture. His head was bare, he was half undressed, and the gold embroidery of his uniform was soiled with dust and blood. He did not speak, but he had raised his head and was glancing vaguely around him. On perceiving the three women who stood there painfully impressed, their hands clasped at sight of the great misfortune that was passing--the whole army struck in the person of its commander at the very first shells fired by the foe--he made a slight inclination of the head, smiling feebly in a paternal way. Some of the bystanders respectfully uncovered, whilst others bustled about, relating that General Ducrot had just been appointed commander-in-chief. It was now half-past seven o'clock.