Seven or eight years later, a third daughter arrived, but I shall speak of her birth in the proper order of time. Victor, Léontine, and Léonore were much older than I, and more naturally became my sister's companions, who was nine years my senior. Cécile, the oldest of the second set of children, whose age was nearer my sister's than mine, joined their ranks. This left me for my playfellows, Augustine, a year older than I, and Félix, two years younger. M, Deviolaine, the head of the family, was an excellent man at heart,--I say at heart, for on the surface nature had endowed him with a tough skin, which for roughness might have vied with the most rugged oak trees in his forest. He was five feet seven inches in height, and had small black eyes, shaded by enormous eyebrows; his lips were thick and protruding, his frame was that of a Hercules, he was clothed with hair like a wild boar and he was hardly as sociable as the animal with which we have taken the liberty of comparing him. His paroxysms of rage--and every day was an April day with him--were the terror of his family. When he came down from his study, which was isolated from the rest of the house, with his face portending storms to come, women, children, and servants fled from his presence, terrified, with their heads down, as shepherd, dogs, and flocks flee before a coming storm. Never but once did I see him with a gracious countenance. Never but once did I hear him speak without swearing. This moral and physical change had been wrought in him by his attempt to gather in a swarm of bees, which he feared would fly away out of his reach. It was summer, and he wore his shirt open. He had rashly shaken the tree in which the swarm was grouped, and half the swarm--that is to say, about ten thousand bees--tumbled on his open breast. This accident took place at the bottom of the garden; we were all gathered round the kitchen door, waiting to see the result of the operation, when all at once we caught sight of him at the end of a path, coming towards the house with measured steps, smiling, holding out his shirt with both his hands and saying in the gentlest tones: "There, my little ones--there--" And we gazed at him from afar, marvelling to see him walk with such an unaccustomed gait, smiling such an unusual smile, talking with that incomprehensible urbanity. Everyone asked himself to whom M. Deviolaine was talking and smiling thus. M. Deviolaine was talking and smiling to the bees. His mild tones succeeded, and they all flew off him, every single bee, not one of them stinging him; but when the last had flown away, and he raised his eyes, and discovered his wife, his children, and his servants all perched on the kitchen steps looking at him, there was such an outburst of "_mille tonnerres_" and other oaths that the household did not recover for a week after! As for us, we disappeared like magic; one would have thought the ground had opened beneath our feet and swallowed us up.