Schwartz: A History | Page 4

whose native friendliness altogether outruns his discretion, and
who is doomed from birth to fall into error, and to encounter
consequent rebuffs which must be grievous to be borne.
My new companion wore a collar, and had other signs that
distinguished him from the mere mongrel of the village street, but he
was of no particular breed. His coat was of a bluish gray, and though
soft enough to the touch, had a harsh and spiky aspect. He came nearer
to being a broken-haired terrier than anything else, but I seemed to
discern half a dozen crosses in him, and a lover of dogs who asked for
breed would not have offered sixpence for him.

II

Somewhere about the year 1560 this tranquil and beautiful country was
devastated by a plague which carried off hundreds of its sparse
inhabitants, and left many villages desolate. The legends of the
countryside tell of places in which no human life remained.
The people of Janenne, headed by the doyen, made a pilgrimage in
procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, and offered to strike a
bargain. They promised that if Janenne should be spared from the
plague they and their descendants for ever would each year repeat that
procession in honour of Our Lady of Lorette, and that once in seven
years they would appear under arms and fire a salvo. Whether in
consequence of this arrangement or not, Janenne escaped the plague,
and from that year to this the promised procession has never been
forgotten. In course of time it became less the local mode than it had
been to carry arms, and nowadays the great septennial procession can
only be gone through after a prodigious deal of drilling and preparation.
A week or two after my arrival the villagers began to train, under the
conduct of a stout military-looking personage, who had been in the
Belgian cavalry and gendarmerie, and was now in honourable
retirement from war's alarms as a grocer. He traded under the name of
Dorn-Casart--the wife's maiden name being tacked to his own, after the
manner of the country. This habit, by the way, gives a certain flavour of
aristocracy to the trading names over even the smallest shop windows.
'Coqueline-Walhaert, negotiant,' is the sign over the establishment
wherein a very infirm old woman sells centimes' worth of sweetstuff to
the jeunesse of Janenne, whilst her husband works at the quarries.
Monsieur Dorn is a man with a huge moustache, fat cheeks streaked
with scarlet lines on a bilious groundwork, and a voice raspy with
much Geneva and the habit of command. He rides with the
unmistakable seat of an old cavalry man, and his behaviour on
horseback was a marked contrast to that of the mounted contingent he
drilled every day in the open place in front of the hotel. His steed,
artfully stimulated by the spur, caracoled, danced, and lashed out with
his hind feet, and Monsieur Dorn, with one fist stuck against his own
fat ribs, swayed to the motion with admirable nonchalance. His voice,

which has the barky tone inseparable from military command, would
ring about the square like the voice of a commander-in-chief, and by
the exercise of a practised imagination, I could almost persuade myself
that I stood face to face with the horrid front of war.
When Monsieur Dorn was not drilling his brigade he was generally to
be found at the Café de la Regence, smoking a huge meerschaum with
a cherry wood stem and sipping Geneva. Even in this comparative
retirement the halo of his office clung about him, and seemed to hold
men oflf from a too familiar intercourse; but one afternoon I saw him
unbending there. He was nearly always accompanied by a dog,
spotlessly white, the most ladylike of her species I remember to have
seen. Her jet-black beady eyes and jet-black glittering nose set oflf the
snowy whiteness of her coat, and were in turn set off by it. She had a
refined, coquettish, mincing walk, which alone was enough to bespeak
the agreeable sense she had of her own charms. Perhaps a satiric
observer of manners might have thought her more like a lady's-maid
than a lady. A suggestion of pertness in her beady eyes, and a certain
superciliousness of bearing were mingled with a coquetry not
displeasing to one who surveyed her from the human height. To look
important is pretty generally to feel important, but is, by no means, to
be important. We discern this fact with curious clearness when we look
at other people, but it is nowhere quite so evident as in what we call the
brute creation. (As if we didn't belong to it!) Perhaps there are
intelligences who look at us with just such a pitying amusement