Jeanne-Marie
I
Jeanne-Marie lived alone in the white cottage at the far end of the village street.
It was a long narrow street of tall houses, stretching each side of the white shining road, for two hundred yards or more. A street that was cool and shadeful even in the shadeless summer days, when the sun burned most hotly, when the broad roads dazzled between their avenues of plane-tree and poplar, and the mountains disappeared from the horizon in the blue haze of heat.
From her little garden Jeanne-Marie liked to look at the mountains each morning, and, when for two or three days following they were not to be seen, she would shake her head reproachfully, as at the failing of old friends.
"My boys, Jeanne-Marie is only thirty-seven," Bourdet the innkeeper said to his companions, as they sat, one May afternoon, smoking under the chestnut-trees in front of the café. They all looked up as he spoke, and watched Jeanne-Marie, as she walked slowly past them to her cottage.
"Bourdet has been paying court," said Leguillon, the fat, red-faced
