ble,
for which he had left his native village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, he
had, just before meeting Adrienne, fallen a victim to a profound
melancholy and realized the necessity of deciding upon his career.

He was then thirty-four. Except the years spent in the study of law at
Paris amid the turmoil of the left bank of the Seine, he had always
lived in the province--his own province of Dauphine. He had grown up in
the old house at Saint-Laurent, where every nook and corner kept for him
its own sweet memory of his childhood and youth. The great white
drawing-room with its wainscotings of the time of Louis XVI., which
opened out upon a flight of steps leading down into a terraced garden;
the portraits of obscure ancestors: lawyers in powdered wigs and wearing
the robes of the members of the Third estate, fat and rosy with double
chins resting upon their broad cravats, amiable old ladies with oddly
arranged hair and flowered gowns, coquettish still as they smiled in
their oval, wooden frames, and then the old books in their old-fashioned
bindings slumbering in a great bookcase with glass doors, or piled up on
shelves below the fowling-pieces, the game-bags and the powder-horns.

With this dwelling of which he thought so often now, his whole past was
linked, about it still clung something of its past poetry, and it was
sacred through the memories it preserved, and as the scene of the
unforgotten joys of childhood. He could see again, the great
stone-flagged kitchen, where they sat up at nights telling stories, the
chamber above it, the bed with its heavy serge curtains, where he
lay--sometimes shaking with terror--all alone, adjoining the room once
occupied by his father, and the moonlight shining through the tall old
trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds
cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed
to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase
as told by old Catherine, the cook, in bated tones during their vigils.

It was there that he went every year to pass his holidays with his
mother, who had had the courage to send him away,--just as during winter
she had plunged him into cold water--to the Lyceum at Grenoble, whence
he would return to Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, "so thin, poor child!" as his
mother said.

And how fat she would send him back again to school,--to make the
masters ashamed of their stinginess.

How pleasant were the re