"See there! major!" cried the grenadier.
"Adieu!" said a woman's voice.
Philippe de Sucy fell to the ground, overcome with horror and fatigue.
CHAPTER III
THE CURE
"My poor niece became insane," continued the physician, after a few
moment's silence. "Ah! monsieur," he said, seizing the marquis's hand,
"life has been awful indeed for that poor little woman, so young, so
delicate! After being, by dreadful fatality, separated from the
grenadier, whose name was Fleuriot, she was dragged about for two
years at the heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches.
She was often, they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for
months together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up;
sometimes kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God
alone knows the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived.
She was locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the
time her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816,
the grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went
after making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the
grenadier that she had lived for a whole month in the forest, where
they had tracked her in vain, trying to catch her, but she had always
escaped them.
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