The Garden of Swords by Max Pemberton

Old Pere Bonot, sunning himself before the doors of a cafe 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 Pere 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.

"Nevertheless, my friends," said he, covering his retreat with a great show of folding the paper and setting his glasses, "nevertheless -- her mother was a French woman! Marry the devil to a good girl -- and, as the saying goes, there is no more devil. I remember Marie Douay -- twenty, twenty-two years ago. I saw her at Goersdorf with Madame Helene, a little brunette, always gay, always laughing; a bird to cage in Paris; a bird of the gardens and not of the mountains. When she married the Englishman, milord Hamilton, who had lived for two years in the Broglie here, was it for me to be surprised? _Nom d'un gaillard_, I was not surprised at all. The eagle to the mountains, the gold-breast to the cage. Certainly we were too sleepy for Marie Douay. She went to London with milord -- _et apres_ -- "