He hurried along, with all these thoughts running through his brain, and the collar of his fur-coat wrapped round his head.  Suddenly he made up his mind.  A cab was passing; he hailed it, drove home, and, when his valet, just roused from a nap, had opened the door.

“Louis,” said he, “we start to-morrow evening for Marseilles.  We’ll remain there perhaps a fortnight.  You will make all the necessary preparations.”

The train rushed on past the Rhone with its sandbanks, then through yellow plains, bright villages, and a wide expanse of country, shut in by bare mountains, which rose on the distant horizon.

The Baron de Mordiane, waking up after a night spent in a sleeping compartment of the train, looked at himself, in a melancholy fashion, in the little mirror of his dressing-case.  The glaring sun of the South showed him some wrinkles which he had not observed before—­a condition of decrepitude unnoticed in the imperfect light of Parisian rooms.  He thought, as he examined the corners of his eyes, and saw the rumpled lids, the temples, the skinny forehead: 

“Damn it, I’ve not merely got the gloss taken off—­I’ve become quite an old fogy.”

And his desire for rest suddenly increased, with a vague yearning, born in him for the first time, to take his grandchildren on his knees.

About one o’clock in the afternoon, he arrived in a landau which he had hired at Marseilles, in front of one of those houses of Southern France so white, at the end of their avenues of plane-trees that they dazzle us and make our eyes droop.  He smiled as he pursued his way along the walk before the house, and reflected: 

“Deuce take it! this is a nice place.”

Suddenly, a young rogue of five or six made his appearance, starting out of a shrubbery, and remained standing at the side of the path, staring at the gentleman with eyes wide open.

Mordiane came over to him: 

“Good morrow, my boy.”

The brat made no reply.

The baron, then, stooping down, took him up in his arms to kiss him, but, the next moment, suffocated by the smell of garlic with which the child seemed impregnated all over, he put him back again on the ground, muttering: 

“Oh! it is the gardener’s son.”

And he proceeded towards the house.

The linen was hanging out to dry on a cord before the door—­shirts and chemises, napkins, dish-cloths, aprons, and sheets, while a row of socks, hanging from strings one above the other, filled up an entire window, like sausages exposed for sale in front of a pork-butcher’s shop.

The baron announced his arrival.  A servant-girl appeared, a true servant of the South, dirty and untidy, with her hair hanging in wisps and falling over her face, while her petticoat under the accumulation of stains which had soiled it had retained only a certain uncouth remnant of its old color, a hue suitable for a country fair or a mountebank’s tights.