The farmers of Dauphine generally think of making their sons tillers of the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy, hardy life of the country.  Good, well-built fellows, their chests enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks of the Isere and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.

Sulpice had an old uncle on his father’s side who proposed to his sister-in-law to give up his broad acres—­a fortune in themselves—­to Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter.  Sulpice refused.  He would not marry for money.

“Fiddle-faddle!” cried his uncle.  “Sickly sentimentality!  If he cultivates that grain, my brother’s son will not make much headway.”

“There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law.  What my poor Raymond had not time to become, his child will be:  a lawyer at once eloquent and honest.”

“Well, well,” replied the uncle, “but he shall not have my girl.”

Sulpice, after finishing his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at Grenoble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of law and attracted everybody’s attention from the first.  He made pleading a sacred office and not a trade.  Everyone was astonished that he had not remained in Paris.

Why?  He loved his native province, the banks of the Isere, the healthy, poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the snows of the Grand-Som.  A talented man could make his way anywhere,—­moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of speech to be known.  Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as well as from his father’s writings and books, and from the Encyclopaedia that Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak, the baptism of liberty.  He had lived in the feverish days of the past eighty years, through his reading of the Gazette Nationale of those stormy days.  The speeches that he found in those pages—­speeches that still burned like uncooled lava—­of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his glance.  Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast.  He saw as in a vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal truths proclaimed and acclaimed.