They then passed that dangerous place where, eight days before, the stage from Caen to Paris had been robbed. And after that, the roads becoming more and more impassable, they had to start long before day and travel late into the night. Once, on the road, at three o'clock in the morning, their coach bogged, before they had gone two miles, and while it was being dragged out by a reinforcement to their twelve horses of twenty-one oxen, the party walked on. After three
_15.png)
miles on foot, they found themselves very cold and tired, but not a house was to be seen to grant them warmth and rest; so they were obliged to sit on the ground, and Father Doutreleau, mounting a convenient elevation, began, like another St. John the Baptist, to preach to them, exhorting them to penitence; but, as Madeleine writes, what they needed was patience, not penitence. Resuming their march, they finally, to their great joy, discovered a little cottage in which there was only one poor old woman, in bed, and it was not without many
