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With Marie’s and Marcel’s help, one can reconstruct from the ruins the gracious comfort of the old estate, the hospitable kitchen, the chambers warm in winter and tree-shaded in summer, the wide balustrades where the guests sat in long summer gloamings, courting the breeze. It was Marcel who pointed out the view one gains from the steps of the Château, straight through gaping doors and windows, to the sundial from which radiated the alleys of the grove: bronze oaks and beeches, golden plane trees, spruces and tasselled pines.

How is the beauty of that day departed! Half of the grove lies now a waste of scrubby second growth and fallen timber, for here the Germans employed Russian prisoners as lumbermen. No longer the huntsmen and their ladies pace the alleys. Now, on almost any day you may see old women dragging branches from the woods to the basse-cour, to be cut up for fuel. Twenty-six of them, no men, and only two children, the wretched villagers had found in the Baronne’s stables their only shelter after the razing of their homes.