Oh! that great cloister, how full it was on Sundays with the sound of joyous shouting and mad races! How happy were all children who loved adventure beyond the borders of their native town, far from the watchful eye of family and townsfolk, how grateful to the unknown founder of that great nest, once melancholy, but to-day peopled by gay singing birds! How this noise from the living world must have made the nuns tremble in their graves--those black shades that had been women, with bodies containing souls, those skeletons which had once possessed hearts, and had come to bury the passions of their hearts, and the hopes of their souls, and the beauty of their faces in the obscurity of the cloister, in the night of penitence, and in the mysteries of the ascetic life! We laughed where, mayhap, many had wept bitter tears; we leaped and bounded in our joyous childhood, where probably many had paced towards death with slow, sad, hopeless steps. But what cared we, children born but yesterday? Did a past exist in our thoughts? Why, we could scarcely remember last autumn's yellow leaves, scarcely recall last spring's emerald leaves: our memories only went as far back as yesterday's sunshine; our hopes were centred only on to-morrow's sunshine; our future was twenty-four hours; to us, a month was eternity! Oh! what recollections of my childhood, hitherto forgotten, are stored in the pathways of that cloistered domain! When I retrace my steps to-day, at every footfall they arise, as precious as those flowers of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, gathered in the gardens of the _Thousand and one Nights_, which never faded! CHAPTER II The two snakes--M. de Valence and Madame de Montesson--Who little Hermine was--Garnier the wheelwright and Madame de Valence--Madame Lafarge--Fantastic apparition of Madame de Genlis. I had a great fright one day in that beautiful garden. At one corner stood a kind of ruined and roofless tower; in August, the sun's rays concentrated inside this tower and made it as hot as a furnace. It was a curious sight then to watch the flies buzzing there, and the butterflies dancing, the beautiful grey and green lizards gliding along its walls. One day when I was playing near the tower, I heard a sharp hissing noise, and, on going to look what it was, I saw through the opening which had once been a door, two long snakes sitting on their tails, with their bodies coiled round in spirals, darting out their long black tongues at one another, and hissing either with love or rage. Such as these must have been the two serpents to whom Mercury threw his wand, for they looked just like the two that have for ever coiled round that rod. But I was not Mercury, I had not the magic wand that pacified the bitterest hatreds; I took to flight, as Laocoon would have done if he had seen the two serpents of Tenedos rolling in with the tide of the Dardanelles, had he known they had left their island on purpose to strangle himself and his children.