Sire, you may be a Hannibal, you may be a Cæsar, you may be an Octavius, posterity may not yet have had time to decide this question, or maybe the question is already settled; but I am very sure you are no Augustus! Augustus pleaded in person for the old soldier who had served under him at Actium; while you, you condemn to misery the widow of the man who served not only under you, but with you! I have said, sire, that if you failed us, there remained but God to help us. We will see what God did for this poor forsaken family. BOOK III CHAPTER I My mother and I take refuge with my grandfather--Madame Darcourt's house--My first books and my first terrors--The park at Villers-Cotterets--M. Deviolaine and his family--The swarm of bees--The old cloister. We all went to live with my grandfather and grandmother, who were still alive. They enlarged their hearth for us, and took in my mother, my sister, and me. My grandfather reserved rooms at the hôtel de _l'Épée_, where my father had died. We took possession of his chamber of death, and lived in it surrounded by all his belongings. Now, in the midst of the obscurity in which my earliest years float, like half-forgotten dreams, the recollection of the three principal houses in which all my childhood was spent stand sharply defined. These three houses were those of Madame Darcourt, M. Deviolaine, and M. Collard. It will be remembered that I have already had occasion to speak of these three persons, and I may be permitted to say a little about them, were it only to discharge the debt of gratitude we owe them. Moreover, pictures of the kind I am about to draw are nothing without their accessary details. Madame Darcourt was our neighbour; she resided on the ground floor of the house adjoining the one in which my father died. She was the widow of a distinguished military surgeon. She had two children, a son and a daughter. The son might have been twenty-eight, and his name was Antoine. The daughter was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, and was called Éléonore. God granted the mother a long and happy life--she lived to eighty years of age. I hardly knew Antoine, but I was almost brought up by Éléonore. The great attraction to me about this house, besides their kindness to me, was a splendid edition of Buffon with coloured pictures. Every evening, after my mother had made her visit to the cemetery,--a religious office she never missed one single day,--whilst she sat absorbed in her grief in a corner by the fireplace, whilst Madame Darcourt and her daughter sewed, they would put a volume of Buffon in my hands, and were then relieved of any further trouble on my account throughout the evening.