This sturdy, jovial, active little man had taken to wife a woman of a very different character,--the daughter of a country magistrate, Lucie de Villiers. The De Villiers--or rather Devilliers, for their name had split in its passage through time, like a stone which cracks in two as it goes hurtling down a hillside--were magistrates from father to son; they were of that old parliamentary race of Frenchmen who had a lofty idea of the law, and duty, the social conventions, their personal, and especially their professional, dignity, which was fortified by perfect honesty, tempered with a certain conscious uprightness. During the preceding century they had been infected by nonconformist Jansenism, which had given them a grumbling pessimistic quality, as well as a contempt for the Jesuit attitude of mind. They did not see life as beautiful: and, rather than smooth away life's difficulties, they preferred to exaggerate them so as to have good reason to complain. Lucie de Villiers had certain of these characteristics, which were so directly opposed to the not very refined optimism of her husband. She was tall--taller than he by a head--slender, well made; she dressed well and elegantly, though in a rather sober fashion, which made her seem--perhaps designedly--older than she was: she was of a high moral quality: but she was hard on other people; she would countenance no fault, and hardly even a caprice: she was thought cold and disdainful. She was very pious, and that gave rise to perpetual disputes with her husband. For the rest, they were very fond of each other: and, in spite of their frequent disagreements, they could not have lived without each other. They were both rather unpractical: he from want of perception--(he was always in danger of being taken in by good looks and fine words),--she from her absolute inexperience of business--(she knew nothing about it: and having always been kept outside it, she took no interest in it). * * * * * They had two children: a girl, Antoinette, the elder by five years; and a boy, Olivier. Antoinette was a pretty dark-haired child, with a charming, honest face of the French type, round, with sharp eyes, a round forehead, a fine chin, a little straight nose--"one of those very pretty, fine, noble noses" (as an old French portrait-painter says so charmingly) "in which there was a certain imperceptible play of expression, which animated the face, and revealed the subtlety of the workings of her mind as she talked or listened." She had her father's gaiety and carelessness.