The part of the mill which dipped in the Morelle had the air of a barbaric arch stranded there.  A full half of the structure was built on piles.  The water flowed beneath the floor, and deep places were there, renowned throughout the district for the enormous eels and crayfish caught in them.  Below the fall the basin was as clear as a mirror, and when the wheel did not cover it with foam schools of huge fish could be seen swimming with the slowness of a squadron.  Broken steps led down to the river near a stake to which a boat was moored.  A wooden gallery passed above the wheel.  Windows opened, pierced irregularly.  It was a pell-mell of corners, of little walls, of constructions added too late, of beams and of roofs, which gave the mill the aspect of an old, dismantled citadel.  But ivy had grown; all sorts of clinging plants stopped the too-wide chinks and threw a green cloak over the ancient building.  The young ladies who passed by sketched Pere Merlier’s mill in their albums.

On the side facing the highway the structure was more solid.  A stone gateway opened upon the wide courtyard, which was bordered to the right and to the left by sheds and stables.  Beside a well an immense elm covered half the courtyard with its shadow.  In the background the building displayed the four windows of its second story, surmounted by a pigeon house.  Pere Merlier’s sole vanity was to have this front plastered every ten years.  It had just received a new coating and dazzled the village when the sun shone on it at noon.

For twenty years Pere Merlier had been mayor of Rocreuse.  He was esteemed for the fortune he had acquired.  His wealth was estimated at something like eighty thousand francs, amassed sou by sou.  When he married Madeleine Guillard, who brought him the mill as her dowry, he possessed only his two arms.  But Madeleine never repented of her choice, so briskly did he manage the business.  Now his wife was dead, and he remained a widower with his daughter Francoise.  Certainly he might have rested, allowed the mill wheel to slumber in the moss, but that would have been too dull for him, and in his eyes the building would have seemed dead.  He toiled on for pleasure.

Pere Merlier was a tall old man with a long, still face, who never laughed but who possessed, notwithstanding, a very gay heart.  He had been chosen mayor because of his money and also on account of the imposing air he could assume during a marriage ceremony.

Francoise Merlier was just eighteen.  She did not pass for one of the handsome girls of the district, as she was not robust.  Up to her fifteenth year she had been even ugly.