The Garden of Swords

Book excerpt: Old Père Bonot, sunning himself before the doors of a café by the minster, held the Courrier du Bas-Rhin in his hand, and vouchsafed to Rosenbad, the brewer, and to Hummel, the vintner, such particulars of the forthcoming wedding as he found to be good. A glass of coffee stood at Père Bonot's elbow; his blue spectacles rested high upon a forehead where no wrinkles sat; the smoke from his cigarette hung in little white clouds about his iron-grey hair. He sat before the great cathedral of Strasburg; but the paper and its words carried him away to a little village of the mountains where, forty years ago, he had knelt at the altar with Henriette at his side, and an old priest had blessed him, and he had gone out to the sunny vineyards, hand in hand with his girl-wife to their home in a forest of the Vosges. There were tears in old Bonot's eyes when he took up the Courrier again.