II
The Street of the Three Pebbles--la rue des Trois Cailloux--which goes
up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded
highway. Here were the best shops--the hairdresser, at the left-hand
side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have
elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de
quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but
because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth
and stench of life in the desolate fields; then the booksellers'
(Madame Carpentier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not
only the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and
La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and
bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and
daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of I870,
when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated
them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son
dead a hundred times--he was a soldier in Saloniki--rather than that
France should make a compromise peace with the enemy.
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