The coffin was borne by hand with cloths, the lid off in order that for the last time the people might see him with crossed hands in his white shroud. Behind walked Jean Roussière carrying the wax taper which had watched over his master. As for me, while the passing-bell sounded in the distance, I went to weep alone in the fields, for the tree of the house had fallen. The Mas du Juge, the home of my childhood, was now desolate and deserted in my eyes as though it had lost its guardian spirit. The head of the family, Master François my father, had been the last of the patriarchs of Provence, a faithful preserver of traditions and customs, and the last, at least for me, of that austere generation, religious, humble, and self-controlled, who had patiently gone through the miseries and convulsions of the Revolution, giving to France the disinterested devotion which flamed up in her great holocausts, and the indefatigable service of her big armies. One week later the division of property took place. The farm produce and the “stacks,” the horses, oxen, sheep, poultry--all were divided into lots. The furniture, our dear old things, the big four-poster beds, the kneading-trough of iron-work, the meal-chest, the polished wardrobes, the carved kneading-trough, the table, the mirror, all which, ever since my childhood, I had seen as a part of my home life, the rows of plates, the painted china, which never left the shelves of the dresser, the sheets of hemp that my mother herself had woven; agricultural implements, waggons, ploughs, harness, tools, utensils of every kind--all these were collected and set out on the threshing-floor of the farm, to be divided in three divisions by an expert. The servants, hired either by the year or the month, left one after the other. And to the paternal farm,[16] which was not in my division, I had to say good-bye. One afternoon, with my mother and the dog, and Jean Roussière who acted as charioteer, we departed with heavy hearts, to dwell henceforth in the house at Maillane which in the division had fallen to me. It was from personal experience I could write later on in _Mireille_ of home-sickness: Comme au mas, comme au temps de mon pére, hélas! hélas! CHAPTER XVI “MIREILLE” The following year (1856), at the time of the fête of Sainte-Agathe, patroness of Maillane, I received a visit from a well-known poet in Paris. Fate, or rather the good star of the Félibres, brought him just in the propitious hour. It was Adolphe Dumas--a fine figure of a man some fifty years old, of an æsthetic pallor, with long hair turning grey and a brown moustache like a lap-dog. His black eyes were full of fire, and he had a habit of accompanying his ringing voice with a fine waving gesture of the hand. He was tall, but lame, dragging a crippled leg as he walked. He reminded one of a cypress of Provence agitated by the wind.