CHAPTER III

LUNÉVILLE

Lunéville, a dream of fair women of old and new times, linden scents, and circling Taubes and little white puffs of shrapnel against blue skies.

HÔTEL DES VOSGES, _June 15th, 8 a.m._

Have just breakfasted to the gentle accompaniment of firing on a Taube.

Dear old village life began at an early hour, but of course the Taube put the cocks and the carts and the geese and all the other usual auroral sounds quite in the background.

My breakfast service is decorated with the same double cross of Lorraine that I saw on various houses in Nancy indicating comfortable cellar accommodation. The cross with the _chardon lorrain_ (Lorraine thistle) is everywhere.

Popping and cannonading going on at a lively rate, and whir of aero wheels; a beautiful day. Some little white puffs of shrapnel visible from my window; I must get dressed and investigate.

Cannonading just stopped. I don’t know whether he got off or was got.

The hotel is discreet and clean, _avec un petit air_.

It has been a good house of the good epoch, and over each window are diverse and charming eighteenth-century _motifs_ in gray stone.

_6.30 p.m._

Just home from Vitrimont in a blinding blaze of sun, in a motor driven by E. M., and bearing in large letters the words “Commission Californienne pour la Reconstruction des Villages Dévastés,” a sort of “open sesame,” and everywhere bayonets were lowered to let us pass. Nerves a-quiver with another day’s impressions. Tried lying down, but it didn’t go, so I am in an arm-chair looking out of my Lorraine window in full eighteenth century as regards setting, but with a very definite tide of twentieth-century warfare sweeping through it all. Meant to go to church, where there are special prayers to be offered up, at Benediction, for the needs of Lorraine, but, though the spirit was willing, the rest of me was like lead after the hot, full day and two hours in one spot too tempting.

This morning, before I was dressed, E. M. and Mrs. C. P., also staying in the hotel, appeared, so I hastily harnessed up for the day and sallied forth with them. We went first to the charming old house of Mlle. Guérin, and, going in through a wide hallway, stepped out into a large garden, where, under some trees, several ladies were sitting, one of them Madame Saint-R. T. We embraced cordially, in the very evident fulfilment of destiny. Madame Saint-R. T. was reading Pierre Boyé’s _Cour de Lunéville_, which I matched with Gaston Maugras’s, and then I looked about me.

The house, gray and long and low, was, until a hundred years ago, a Capuchin monastery, when it came into the hands of Mlle. Guérin’s family. There are old linden-trees in the garden, and some tall cedars and roses not doing very well; and masses of canterbury-bells and geraniums. At one end of the garden, against the wall, is an ancient statue of the Virgin, dark, moss-grown, against still darker walls; we placed the flowers we had gathered on her breast and in the hands of the Child. _Avions_ were humming above in the perfect sky, and against the faultless blue was a very white crescent moon just discernible.

After accepting an invitation for dinner that night, we walked out through the town toward the Château, once the haunt of witty rulers, philosophers, and of the fair and evidently too-amiable ladies beloved by them. However, when we got into the great square of the palace I forgot about them, for, looking up at the statue of Lasalle, born in Metz, 1775, and fallen at the battle of Wagram, 1807, were two Senegalese whom _we_ looked at as the Lunéville populace might once have looked at the camels the young Duke Léopold brought back with him from his wars with the Turks. The juxtaposition was as strange. One of the Senegalese had on a blue cap, the other a red. We gave each one a franc for cigarettes, received large-mouthed, white-toothed smiles, and proceeded to look at the remains of a German _avion_ which had fallen beside the statue the day before, the most complete wreck possible. The aviator had been killed and his broken wings were being removed to the Museum. It made me quite still—there was something so complete about it all, the great Château in the background, the statue of Lasalle, the two Senegalese, the shattered Taube!

We walked on rather quietly over the bridge of the Vesouze to the Place des Carmes—the Place Brûlée, as it is now called. The big Carmelite convent which formed the square had been used as a barracks for a generation or so, and one side had been burned with incendiary bombs when the Germans left, while the other side was untouched. In the middle was the statue of L’Abbé Grégoire (who made the mistake of being ahead of his time), and on the pedestal are the words, “_J’ai vécu sans lâcheté, je veux mourir sans remords_.” We stopped only a moment at the church—eighteenth century, of course; fine old choir, delicate baroque designs on the great wooden doors, and dominating towers in a lovely reddish stone, with charming _motifs_ of urn and scroll, and flying angels against the sky, or rather _in_ it.

We began to have that “gone” feeling about this time, and turned back through the town to E.M.’s house, where we were to lunch. It was cool and charming as we stepped in out of the sun-flooded garden, stripped of the mystery of the night before, but quite lovely. In old Lunéville china vases were masses of pink and purple canterbury-bells. It had been hastily but charmingly got ready for occupancy with old furniture that nice people in the provinces can put at the disposition of their friends, and I saw again Miss P., the Isolde of the dim, scented garden of the night before. After lunch we sat in an arbor jutting into a corner of the ancient park, drinking our coffee, and eating some Mirror candies just out from New York—all to the continued hum of _avions_ and the rather soft crack of guns. Then the motor was announced, or, to be faithful to reality, somebody said, “We’d better be off.” We put on our veils, got into the motor, which E.M. cranked herself, and started off to Vitrimont without any male assistance of any kind.