We entered the farmhouse.  The smoky kitchen was high and spacious.  The copper utensils and the crockery shone in the reflection of the hearth.  A cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table.  One perceived an odor of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor of spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of persons, the odor of time, and of things that have passed away.

I went out to have a look at the farmyard.  It was very large, full of apple trees, dwarfed and crooked, and laden with fruit which fell on the grass around them.  In this farmyard the Norman smell of apples was as strong as that of the bloom of orange trees on the shores of the south of France.

Four rows of beeches surrounded this inclosure.  They were so tall that they seemed to touch the clouds at this hour of nightfall, and their summits, through which the night winds passed, swayed and sang a mournful, interminable song.

I reentered the house.

The baron was warming his feet at the fire, and was listening to the farmer’s talk about country matters.  He talked about marriages, births and deaths, then about the fall in the price of grain and the latest news about cattle.  The “Veularde” (as he called a cow that had been bought at the fair of Veules) had calved in the middle of June.  The cider had not been first-class last year.  Apricots were almost disappearing from the country.

Then we had dinner.  It was a good rustic meal, simple and abundant, long and tranquil.  And while we were dining I noticed the special kind of friendly familiarity which had struck me from the start between the baron and the peasant.

Outside, the beeches continued sighing in the night wind, and our two dogs, shut up in a shed, were whining and howling in an uncanny fashion.  The fire was dying out in the big fireplace.  The maid-servant had gone to bed.  Maitre Lebrument said in his turn: 

“If you don’t mind, M’sieu le Baron, I’m going to bed.  I am not used to staying up late.”

The baron extended his hand toward him and said:  “Go, my friend,” in so cordial a tone that I said, as soon as the man had disappeared: 

“He is devoted to you, this farmer?”

“Better than that, my dear fellow!  It is a drama, an old drama, simple and very sad, that attaches him to me.  Here is the story: 

“You know that my father was colonel in a cavalry regiment.  His orderly was this young fellow, now an old man, the son of a farmer.  When my father retired from the army he took this former soldier, then about forty; as his servant.  I was at that time about thirty.  We were living in our old chateau of Valrenne, near Caudebec-en-Caux.