Robert finishing his Diary

I end here my diary, in which I have tried to give the experiences of my five months of solitude. To-day I returned to Draveil in the Doctor’s carriage, but without hiding this time. The roads were full of peasants returning home. Many are already at work again on the land. All faces are sad, but no complaints are heard. Is it fatalism or resignation?

The Prussians still occupy the village, enforcing their triumph with cool insolence. They, however, appear less brutal with the inhabitants. I saw some walking about hand-in-hand with little children. It was like the beginning of a return to their forsaken hearths, to their sedentary lives, so long disturbed by this war . . . When I came home in the evening, I saw on the doorstep of the keeper’s house, old Guillard’s widow, dressed in deep mourning and hardly recognisable. Poor woman! her husband dead and her home a wreck. Her misfortunes are complete. I heard her weeping as she tried to put in order the remains of her household goods.

Papers Silence reigns at the Hermitage. It is a clear night and the air is balmy. Already the presence of spring is beginning to be felt under the fast melting snow. The forest will soon bud forth, and I shall watch to see the grass blades pushing aside the dead leaves. From the distant quiet plains rises a misty vapour like the smoke of an inhabited village; and if anything can impart consolation after a cruel war, it is this repose of all Nature and mankind, this universal calm which rests upon a shattered country—a country recruiting its strength by sleep, forgetful of the lost harvest in preparing for that of the future!

Commencing tilling the fields

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