We sat down at the foot of an oak and opened Rene.  We faced the lake where he had often watched the nimble swallow on the bending reeds; we sat in the shadow of the forest where he had often pursued rainbows over the dripping hills; we harkened to the rustling of the leaves and the whisperings of the water that had added their murmur to the sad melody of his youth.  As the darkness gathered on the pages of the book, the bitterness of its words went to our hearts, and we experienced a sensation of mingled melancholy and sweetness.

A wagon passed in the road, and the wheels sank in the deep tracks.  A smell of new-mown hay pervaded the air.  The frogs were croaking in the marshes.  We went back.

The sky was heavy and a storm raged all night.  The front of a neighbouring house was illumined and flared like a bonfire at every flash of lightning.  Gasping, and tired of tossing on my bed, I arose, lighted a candle, opened the window and leaned out.

The night was dark, and as silent as slumber.  The lighted candle threw my huge shadow on the opposite wall.  From time to time a flash of lightning blinded me.

I thought of the man whose early life was spent here and who filled half a century with the clamouring of his grief.

I thought of him first in these quiet streets, playing with the village boys and looking for nests in the church-steeple and in the woods.  I imagined him in his little room, leaning his elbows on the table, and watching the rain beating on the window-panes and the clouds passing above the curtain, while his dreams flew away.  I thought of the bitter loneliness of youth, with its intoxications, its nausea, and its bursts of love that sicken the heart.  Is it not here that our own grief was nourished, is this not the very Golgotha where the genius that fed us suffered its anguish?

Nothing can express the gestation of the mind or the thrills which future great works impart to those who carry them; but we love to see the spot where we know they were conceived and lived, as if it had retained something of the unknown ideal which once vibrated there.

His room! his room! his childhood’s poor little room!  It was here that he was tormented by vague phantoms which beckoned to him and clamoured for birth:  Attala shaking the magnolias out of her hair in the soft breeze of Florida, Velleda running through the woods in the moonlight, Cymodocee protecting her white bosom from the claws of the leopards, and frail Amelie and pale Rene!

One day, however, he tears himself away from the old feudal homestead, never to return.  Now he is lost in the whirl of Paris and mingles with his fellow-men; and then he feels an impulse to travel and he starts off.