lark, and to go to mass every Sunday, and to be a loyal son to your country. Nothing more."
And thereat he had smiled and straightened his stalwart frame, and gone right willingly to the voting-urn.
He was very stupid in these things; and Reine Allix, though clear-headed and shrewd, was hardly more learned in them than he.
"Look you," she had said to him oftentimes, "in my babyhood there was the old white flag upon the château. Well, they pulled that down and put up a red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three colours. Then somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one day and set up the old white one afresh; and before the day was done that was down again, and the tricolour again up where it is still. Now some I know fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of the flags, but as for me, I could not see that any one of them mattered: bread was just as dear, and sleep was just as sweet, whichever of the three was uppermost."
Bernadou, who had never known but the flag of three colours, believed her, as, indeed, he believed every word that those kindly and resolute old lips ever uttered to him.
He had never been in a city, and only once,
