He remembered only his father’s dreamy and refined face in the portrait of a young, sad-looking man in a lawyer’s black gown, before which he had stood when quite small, and spelled out as he might have lisped a prayer, the four letters:  papa.  Alone in this little town of Grenoble, 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.