CHAPTER I

My mother and I take refuge with my grandfather--Madame Darcourt's house--My first books and my first terrors--The park at Villers-Cotterets--M. Deviolaine and his family--The swarm of bees--The old cloister.

We all went to live with my grandfather and grandmother, who were still alive. They enlarged their hearth for us, and took in my mother, my sister, and me.

My grandfather reserved rooms at the hôtel de _l'Épée_, where my father had died. We took possession of his chamber of death, and lived in it surrounded by all his belongings.

Now, in the midst of the obscurity in which my earliest years float, like half-forgotten dreams, the recollection of the three principal houses in which all my childhood was spent stand sharply defined.

These three houses were those of Madame Darcourt, M. Deviolaine, and M. Collard. It will be remembered that I have already had occasion to speak of these three persons, and I may be permitted to say a little about them, were it only to discharge the debt of gratitude we owe them. Moreover, pictures of the kind I am about to draw are nothing without their accessary details.

Madame Darcourt was our neighbour; she resided on the ground floor of the house adjoining the one in which my father died. She was the widow of a distinguished military surgeon. She had two children, a son and a daughter. The son might have been twenty-eight, and his name was Antoine. The daughter was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, and was called Éléonore.

God granted the mother a long and happy life--she lived to eighty years of age.

I hardly knew Antoine, but I was almost brought up by Éléonore.

The great attraction to me about this house, besides their kindness to me, was a splendid edition of Buffon with coloured pictures.

Every evening, after my mother had made her visit to the cemetery,--a religious office she never missed one single day,--whilst she sat absorbed in her grief in a corner by the fireplace, whilst Madame Darcourt and her daughter sewed, they would put a volume of Buffon in my hands, and were then relieved of any further trouble on my account throughout the evening.

In consequence I learnt to read--and though I do not know _how_, I can say _why_: I wanted to read about the history, the habits, the instincts of the animals whose portraits I looked at. The result of this interest of mine in batrachians, and especially in ophidians, was such that, at the age when children are still spelling, I had already read all the books other which form a child's library.

While at Madame Darcourt's house I experienced the sensation of fear for the first time--a feeling hitherto totally unknown to me.

My mania for reading extended in every direction, even to newspapers--in later years so little read by me.

One day I came upon the _Journal de l'Empire_, and I read in it a short article relating how a prisoner, entombed in the dungeons of Amiens, had been devoured there by a snake.

I had hitherto looked upon snakes as monsters, if not altogether mythical yet belonging to quite another part of the globe than ours.

In Buffon, or rather in Daudin's continuation of him, snakes had been a constant source of curiosity to me; after reading the _Journal de l'Empire_, they inspired me with the greatest terror.

The evening I read that fatal article I pretended to be absorbed in reading _Robinson Crusoe_, and I asked to be allowed to sit up as late as possible, meaning until my mother should herself go to bed.

The favour was readily granted me; but when the same excuse was renewed the next day, the day after that and several nights running, I was compelled to give an explanation.

I recounted the story of the prisoner of Amiens, and I confessed that if I went to bed by myself I should be afraid of being eaten up by a snake.

My mother was greatly surprised at this confession, for I had been so brave hitherto. She did her utmost to reason away my fears, but reason failed in the face of instinct, and time alone softened although it did not altogether efface the recollection of that awful picture.

Next to Madame Darcourt's house--to which I shall again have occasion to refer--were the other two households who were so hospitable to us in our misfortunes, those of M. Deviolaine and M. Collard.

M. Deviolaine was our cousin by marriage; he had married a niece of my grandfather, who, as she was an orphan, had been brought up with my mother in our family circle; furthermore, he had been my father's intimate friend.

M. Deviolaine was Inspector of Forests for the district of Villers-Cotterets, which gave him a leading position in our little town; and quite naturally, too, since there were only 2400 inhabitants in the town, whereas the forest covered 50,000 acres.

M. Deviolaine was a great dignitary in my eyes, not so much because of the above-mentioned reason, but because, in virtue of the position he held, he could grant leave to shoot in the forest, and to go hunting freely some day in that forest was one of the ambitions of my childhood.

This ambition, among several others, has since been realised; and I should add that it has been one that has yielded the least disappointment in the fulfilment.

In comparison with the small rooms to which we had been confined since my father's death, M. Deviolaine's house seemed a palace; and I, poor child, greatly appreciated the change, for, brought up as I had been at the châteaux of Fossés and of Antilly, and running wild in the walks and over the lawns, I seemed to live on air and sunshine. M. Deviolaine's house contained first and foremost a suite of rooms covering a considerable area, stables and coach-houses, yards and a charming garden, partly English, partly French, partly picturesque, partly kitchen garden. The English garden contained waterfalls, pools, and weeping-willow trees; the fruit garden was full of pears, peaches, greengages, artichokes, and melons, and then it opened upon a fine park, which you could see through the railings, and which you could walk into through a gateway.

This park, planted by François I., was cut down by Louis-Philippe.

Grand trees they were! Under their shade François I. had lain by the side of Madame d'Étampes, Henri II. with his Diane de Poitiers, Henri IV. with Gabrielle: it was natural to expect that a Bourbon would have reverenced these trees, and permitted the long life of beeches and oaks; that birds would have sung on their dead and leafless boughs as they sang on them when green and in full leaf! Unluckily, there is a material value attached to them, besides the inestimable one of poetry and memories. You glorious beeches, with your polished, silvery trunks, you fine oaks with your dark and rugged bark--you were worth 100,000 crowns! The King of France, who thought himself too poor to keep you standing, and had his twelve millions from the civil list besides his private fortune of six millions, must needs sell you! Had you been my sole means of fortune, I would have kept you; for, being a poet, I love the murmur of the wind through your leaves above all the gold earth can give; the shadows that flicker under my tread; the delicious visions, the lovely phantoms, which, at eventide, between day and night, in the dubious hour of twilight, glide in and out between your venerable trunks, as flit the shades of the ancient race of Abencérage between the myriad columns of Cordova's royal mosque.

There was not the least idea of this in the mind of that other poet, Demoustier, when he wrote on the bark of one of these trees the following verse: with the trees has it also disappeared, and perhaps I alone remember it:--

"Ce bois fut l'asile chéri De l'amour autrefois fidèle; Tout l'y rappelle encore, et le coeur attendri Soupire en se disant: C'est ici que Henri Soupirait près de Gabrielle."

And notwithstanding all this the king destroyed the forest, the man who believed himself more firmly fixed to the throne than the trees were to the earth. Nothing did he understand of the really great; everything was stripped of the glamour of imagination, and only its material value did he appraise. He said to himself, "Every man can be bought, just as every tree can be sold. I possess vast forests, I will sell the trees, and I will purchase men."

Sire, you were self-deceived. There are other things in life than algebra and mathematics: there is faith, there is belief; you put no faith in others, and others therefore put no faith in you; you breathed scorn on the past, and now the past scorns you.

What a long way we have travelled, though, from the home of M. Deviolaine--which to me seemed such a palace!

Glorious trees, you are more than a palace--you are like a temple! a temple wherein the Lord reveals Himself to me, as I lie at your feet, and try to study the stars, in utter ignorance of their names, through the moving canopy of your foliage, on the fine nights of summer. How many times, when the laughing, restless spirit of childhood begins to yield to the dreams of early manhood; how many times, kissed by the wind-bent grass under me, have I stretched two eager hands towards some star more brilliant than others, and tried to seize a ray of moonlight as it played upon my face! And I have prayed: "Saviour, who art in heaven! Saviour, who art on earth! Saviour, who art everywhere! O Saviour, take me in Thy mighty arms and make me an instrument to glorify and bless Thy power; a harp to sing to Thee, a lyre to praise Thee, a voice to pray to Thee! Make me grow great, O Lord, so that I may be nearer to Thee! and the greater I am the more humbly will I acknowledge Thy name, Thy splendour, Thy majesty!

"It is Thou, O God! who makest the forests to grow which kings sell; Thou who createst the little birds that sing among their branches; Thou who caressest them with the breeze which is Thy smile, and refreshest them with sunshine, which is Thy face, and tearest them up in the storm, which is Thy anger!

"Lord, Thou alone art great, Thou alone art eternal!"

But to return to M. Deviolaine and his house.

Although it was large, its accommodation was far from being superfluous. M. Deviolaine had veritably the family of a patriarch. He had one son and two daughters by his first marriage, and a son and two more daughters by his second.

The latter were our relatives, our cousin being his second wife.

As the name of M. Deviolaine and those of his children are constantly recurring in the relation of the first portion of my life, I must dwell for a moment on this ample family.

The names of the three children by the first marriage were Victor, Léontine, and Léonore; those of the three children of the second were, Félix, Cécile, and Augustine.

Seven or eight years later, a third daughter arrived, but I shall speak of her birth in the proper order of time.

Victor, Léontine, and Léonore were much older than I, and more naturally became my sister's companions, who was nine years my senior. Cécile, the oldest of the second set of children, whose age was nearer my sister's than mine, joined their ranks.

This left me for my playfellows, Augustine, a year older than I, and Félix, two years younger.

M, Deviolaine, the head of the family, was an excellent man at heart,--I say at heart, for on the surface nature had endowed him with a tough skin, which for roughness might have vied with the most rugged oak trees in his forest.

He was five feet seven inches in height, and had small black eyes, shaded by enormous eyebrows; his lips were thick and protruding, his frame was that of a Hercules, he was clothed with hair like a wild boar and he was hardly as sociable as the animal with which we have taken the liberty of comparing him. His paroxysms of rage--and every day was an April day with him--were the terror of his family. When he came down from his study, which was isolated from the rest of the house, with his face portending storms to come, women, children, and servants fled from his presence, terrified, with their heads down, as shepherd, dogs, and flocks flee before a coming storm.

Never but once did I see him with a gracious countenance.

Never but once did I hear him speak without swearing.

This moral and physical change had been wrought in him by his attempt to gather in a swarm of bees, which he feared would fly away out of his reach.

It was summer, and he wore his shirt open. He had rashly shaken the tree in which the swarm was grouped, and half the swarm--that is to say, about ten thousand bees--tumbled on his open breast.

This accident took place at the bottom of the garden; we were all gathered round the kitchen door, waiting to see the result of the operation, when all at once we caught sight of him at the end of a path, coming towards the house with measured steps, smiling, holding out his shirt with both his hands and saying in the gentlest tones:

"There, my little ones--there--"

And we gazed at him from afar, marvelling to see him walk with such an unaccustomed gait, smiling such an unusual smile, talking with that incomprehensible urbanity. Everyone asked himself to whom M. Deviolaine was talking and smiling thus.

M. Deviolaine was talking and smiling to the bees.

His mild tones succeeded, and they all flew off him, every single bee, not one of them stinging him; but when the last had flown away, and he raised his eyes, and discovered his wife, his children, and his servants all perched on the kitchen steps looking at him, there was such an outburst of "_mille tonnerres_" and other oaths that the household did not recover for a week after!

As for us, we disappeared like magic; one would have thought the ground had opened beneath our feet and swallowed us up.

The remarkable fact about all these tempests was, that they ended in nothing worse than clouds and lightning, without any hailstones or thunderbolts. No one ever remembered seeing M. Deviolaine even kick out at his dog--unless the beast were well outside the reach of his foot.

M. Deviolaine possessed another house besides this one; it was called St. Remy, and stood in the middle of a charming little plateau, surrounded on all sides by the forest.

St. Remy specially deserves a few words; the days we went there were fête days indeed!

St. Remy had once been a nunnery, but I do not know to what order it had belonged. I only remember the portrait of the abbess, in a frame above the chimney-piece in the large hall. She was a beautiful woman, clothed entirely in black, with a blue cord round her to which was attached a cross; she was round and plump, stout with the corpulence only to be found among buxom saints. She bore some titled name known in those parts, which I forget.

The convent had been in use until 1791 or 1792; then the laws came into force which destroyed cloistered life, and all these doves of the Lord had to flee: I believe M. Deviolaine bought the convent as ecclesiastical property.

There was an immense cloister attached to this convent--though not so large perhaps in reality as in my remembrance of it: children's eyes see strange hallucinations in the region of memory--space, to their minds, is infinite.

Outside this cloister were great staircases, with iron bannisters, leading to the former apartments of the abbess. Only a portion of these had been fitted up, the rest belonged to rats and cats, which appeared to have settled a truce, for they lived together on a pretty good understanding.

A dozen acres of meadow-land, little woods, and walled-in gardens enclosed this old cloistered building, which was shaded with trees as old as itself.

To-day, trees and cloister have fallen down: nothing really remains on the earth's surface; everything springs up only to decay: the lives of monuments, of trees, and of men, are all but a question of durability; stone and wood decay just as do flesh and bones.

But at that time all was still standing, like the hopes of our young lives; the cloister knew not of black bands or the trees of speculators. It was all sold together, felled timber and ruins, and from the débris of the immense building and the trunks of the oak trees there was left sufficient material to build a pretty little house, of the kind built nowadays, containing one sitting-room four mètres square, and several rooms about twelve feet long by eight feet wide; regular Socrates' houses, empty, small though they be, for want of friends to fill them!

Oh! that great cloister, how full it was on Sundays with the sound of joyous shouting and mad races! How happy were all children who loved adventure beyond the borders of their native town, far from the watchful eye of family and townsfolk, how grateful to the unknown founder of that great nest, once melancholy, but to-day peopled by gay singing birds! How this noise from the living world must have made the nuns tremble in their graves--those black shades that had been women, with bodies containing souls, those skeletons which had once possessed hearts, and had come to bury the passions of their hearts, and the hopes of their souls, and the beauty of their faces in the obscurity of the cloister, in the night of penitence, and in the mysteries of the ascetic life!

We laughed where, mayhap, many had wept bitter tears; we leaped and bounded in our joyous childhood, where probably many had paced towards death with slow, sad, hopeless steps.

But what cared we, children born but yesterday? Did a past exist in our thoughts? Why, we could scarcely remember last autumn's yellow leaves, scarcely recall last spring's emerald leaves: our memories only went as far back as yesterday's sunshine; our hopes were centred only on to-morrow's sunshine; our future was twenty-four hours; to us, a month was eternity!

Oh! what recollections of my childhood, hitherto forgotten, are stored in the pathways of that cloistered domain! When I retrace my steps to-day, at every footfall they arise, as precious as those flowers of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, gathered in the gardens of the _Thousand and one Nights_, which never faded!