Page:The four horsemen of the Apocalypse - (Los cuatro jinetes de Apocalipsis) (IA cu31924014386738).djvu/249

 accounts of the stupendous forces of Germany, enunciated with all the authority of a wife of a great Teutonic patriot, and a mother of an almost celebrated professor. According to her graphic picture, millions of men were now surging forth in enormous streams, thousands of cannons were filing by, and tremendous mortars like monstrous turrets. And towering above all this vast machinery of destruction was a man who alone was worth an army, a being who knew everything and could do everything, handsome, intelligent, and infallible as a god—the Emperor.

"The French just don't know what's ahead of them," declared Doña Elena. "We are going to annihilate them. It is merely a matter of two weeks. Before August is ended, the Emperor will have entered Paris."

Señora Desnoyers was so greatly impressed by these dire prophecies that she could not hide them from her family. Chichí waxed indignant at her mother's credulity and her aunt's Germanism. Martial fervor was flaming up in the former Peoncito. Ay, if the women could only go to war!… She enjoyed picturing herself on horseback in command of a regiment of dragoons, charging the enemy with other Amazons as dashing and buxom as she. Then her fondness for skating would predominate over her tastes for the cavalry, and she would long to be an Alpine hunter, a diable bleu among those who slid on long runners, with musket slung across the back and alpenstock in hand, over the snowy slopes of the Vosges.

But the government did not appreciate the valorous women, and she could obtain no other part in the war but to admire the uniform of her true-love, René Lacour, converted into a soldier. The senator's son certainly looked beautiful. He was tall and fair, of a rather feminine type, recalling his dead mother. In his fiancée's