t
led by chance.

Strictly speaking, Camors had never, until now, been out of Paris; for
wherever he had previously gone, he had carried its bustle, worldly and
artificial life, play, and the races with him; and the watering-places
and the seaside had never shown him true country, or provincial life. It
gave him a sensation for the first time; but the sensation was an odious
one.

As he advanced up this silent road, without houses or lights, it seemed
to him he was wandering amid the desolation of some lunar region. This
part of Normandy recalled to him the least cultivated parts of Brittany.
It was rustic and savage, with its dense shrubbery, tufted grass, dark
valleys, and rough roads.

Some dreamers love this sweet but severe nature, even at night; they love
the very things that grated most upon the pampered senses of Camors, who
strode on in deep disgust, flattering himself, however, that he should
soon reach the Boulevard de Madeleine. But he found, instead, peasants'
huts scattered along the side of the road, their low, mossy roofs seeming
to spring from the rich soil like an enormous fungus growth. Two or three
of the dwellers in these huts were taking the fresh evening air on their
thresholds, and Camors could distinguish through the gloom their heavy
figures and limbs, roughened by coarse toil in the fields, as they stood
mute, motionless, and ruminating in the darkness like tired beasts.

Camors, like all men possessed by a dominant idea, had, ever since he
adopted the religion of his father as his rule of life, taken the pains
to analyze every impression and every thought. He now said to himself,
that between these countrymen and a refined man like himself there was
doubtless a greater difference than between them and their beasts of
burden; and this reflection was as balm to the scornful aristocracy that
was the cornerstone of his theory. Wandering on to an eminence, his
discouraged eye swept but a fresh horizon of apple-trees and heads of
barley, and he was about to turn back when a strange sound suddenly
arrested his steps. It was a concert of voice and instruments, which in
this lost solitude seemed to him like a dream, or a miracle. The music
was good-even excellent. He recognized a prelude of Bach, arranged by
Gounod. Robinson Crusoe, on discovering the footprint in the sand, was
not more astonished than Camors at finding in this desert so lively a
symptom of civilization.

Filled with curiosity,