Once during the Reign of Terror he had been requisitioned to carry corn to Paris, where famine was then raging. It was just after they had killed the king, and France was paralysed with consternation and horror. One winter’s day, returning across Bourgogne, with a cold sleet beating in his face and his cart-wheels half buried in the muddy road, he met a carrier of his own village. The two compatriots shook hands, and my father inquired whither the other was bound in this villainous weather: “I am for Paris, citizen,” replied the man, “taking there our church bells and altar saints.” “Accursed fellow,” cried my father, trembling with wrath and indignation, and taking off his hat as he looked at the church relics. “I suppose you think on your return they will make you a Deputy for this devil’s work?” The iconoclast skulked off with an oath and went on his way. My father, I should observe, was profoundly religious. In the evening, summer and winter, it was his custom to gather round him the household, and kneeling on his chair, head uncovered and hands crossed, his white hair in a queue tied with a black ribbon, he would pray and read the gospels aloud to us. My father read but three books in his life: the New Testament, the “Imitation,” and “Don Quixote”; the latter he loved because it recalled his campaign in Spain, and helped to pass the time when a rainy season forced him indoors. In his youth schools were rare, and it was from a poor pedlar, who made his rounds of the farms once a week, that my father learnt his alphabet. On Sunday after vespers, according to the old-time usage as head of the house, he did the weekly accounts, debit and credit with annotations, in a great volume called “Cartabèou.” Whatever the weather, he was always content. When he heard grumbling, either at tempestuous winds or torrential rains, “Good people,” he would say, “the One above knows very well what He is about and also what we need.... Supposing these great winds which revivify our Provence and clear off the fogs and vapours of our marshes never blew? And if, equally, we were never visited by the heavy rains which supply the wells and springs and rivers? We need all sorts, my children.” Though he would not scorn to pick up a faggot on the road and carry it to the hearth, and though he was content with vegetables and brown bread for his daily fare, and was so abstemious always as to mix water with his wine, yet at his table the stranger never failed to find a welcome, and his hand and purse were ever open to the poor. Faithful to the old customs, the great festival of the year on our farm was Christmas Eve. That day the labourers knocked off work early, and my mother presented to each one, wrapped up in a cloth, a fine oil-cake, a stick of nougat, a bunch of dried figs, a cream cheese, a salad of celery, and a bottle of wine.