For a few moments he leaned over the balustrade of the terrace and looked around. The night, clear and beautiful, enveloped in its shadowy veil the widestretching fields, and a solemn stillness, strange to Parisian ears, reigned around him, broken only at intervals by the distant bay of a hound, rising suddenly, and dying into peace again. His eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, Camors descended the terrace stairs and passed into the old avenue, which was darker and more solemn than a cathedral-aisle at midnight, and thence into an open road into which it led by chance. Strictly speaking, Camors had never, until now, been out of Paris; for wherever he had previously gone, he had carried its bustle, worldly and artificial life, play, and the races with him; and the watering-places and the seaside had never shown him true country, or provincial life. It gave him a sensation for the first time; but the sensation was an odious one. As he advanced up this silent road, without houses or lights, it seemed to him he was wandering amid the desolation of some lunar region. This part of Normandy recalled to him the least cultivated parts of Brittany. It was rustic and savage, with its dense shrubbery, tufted grass, dark valleys, and rough roads. Some dreamers love this sweet but severe nature, even at night; they love the very things that grated most upon the pampered senses of Camors, who strode on in deep disgust, flattering himself, however, that he should soon reach the Boulevard de Madeleine. But he found, instead, peasants’ huts scattered along the side of the road, their low, mossy roofs seeming to spring from the rich soil like an enormous fungus growth. Two or three of the dwellers in these huts were taking the fresh evening air on their thresholds, and Camors could distinguish through the gloom their heavy figures and limbs, roughened by coarse toil in the fields, as they stood mute, motionless, and ruminating in the darkness like tired beasts.