How pleasant were the reminiscences of those sunny days amongst the mountains, the excursions to Grande Chartreuse, where the murmuring brook trickled among the rocks, the halts at Guiers-Mort or under the trees in the stillness of a drowsy day in summer; how delightful to stretch one’s self out at the foot of the cliffs or on a grassy slope with a book, pausing now and then to indulge in day-dreams or glance up at the fleecy clouds floating in the blue sky above his head and watch them gathering, then vanishing and melting away like smoke wreaths!  Ah! how sweet were those long, idle days full of dreams, when the noise of the waterfall dashing over the rocks lulled the senses like some merry song, or a nurse’s tender, crooning lullaby.

In those days Sulpice made no plans for his future, where he would go, what he would do, or what would become of him; but he felt within himself unbounded hope, a hope as limitless and bright as the azure sky above him, the inspiration of devotion, love and poetry.  He asked himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the people.  It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question:  “Will a woman ever love me?”

To be loved!  What a dream!  One day he put this question to one of his comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in the neighborhood, who answered: 

“Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are loved even too much!”

Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but softened materially by his mother’s almost excessive care, it had left, as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left him.

Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing again his mother’s voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated!  Even as a representative or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him, so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm—­far away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.