"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. His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions, remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so much adored. The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National Assembly. He had just passed his thirty-fourth year. His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by this brilliant launch on his career.