Can it be that the world was unaware of, did not even suspect, the existence of three hundred children who were organized in a rhythm of love and hate in the fairest spot of fairest Touraine? There, among the flowers (those garden flowers and those which I offer to dead soldiers, anxiously, lest they not suffice, have been, ever since, my infernal props) among the flowers and rare varieties of trees, the Colony led its secret life, worrying the peasants for fifteen miles around, for they feared that a sixteen-year-old colonist might escape and set fire to their farms. Furthermore, as every peasant was given a fifty-franc reward for each runaway child he brought back, the Mettray countryside was the scene, night and day, of an actual child-hunt, complete with pitchforks, shotguns and dogs. If a colonist went out at night, he strewed terror through the fields. Rio, whom I cannot think of without being moved by his maidenly sweetness, was about eighteen when he tried to run away. He dared set fire to a barn so that the panic-stricken peasants would get up and run to the fire in their nightshirts without taking time to lock the door. He entered unseen and stole a jacket and pair of trousers in order to get rid of the white canvas breeches and blue twill smock that were the uniform of the Colony and that would have singled him out. The house blazed away magnificently. Children, so it was reported, were burned to a crisp, cows perished, but the bold, remorseless child got as far as Orléans. It is a known fact that young countrywomen always leave a jacket and pair of trousers on the clothes-line in the hope and fear that a runaway will steal them, move the line, which rings a bell, and so be caught. Traps laid by women’s hands surrounded the Colony with an invisible, undetectable danger which threw pairs of frightened kids into a wild panic. The mere memory of this causes me, within my affliction, a greater affliction, fills me with frightful gloom at the thought that this childhood world is dead. Only one phrase can express my sadness, the one that is always written at the end of a prince’s visit to the scenes of his former loves or the scenes of his glory: “ . . . and he wept . . .”

Fontevrault, like Mettray, could be rendered by a long list of the couples which were formed by names:

Botchako and Bulkaen

Sillar and Venture

Rocky and Bulkaen

Deloffre and Toscano

Mouline and Monot

Lou Daybreak and Jo

Bulkaen and I

Divers and I

Rocky and I.