“You’ll take me over your farm, won’t you?” Lerne shrugged his shoulders: “Perhaps,” he said. Then turning towards the house, he shouted: “Wilhelm, Wilhelm!” The German with the face like a sundial opened a little window and the Professor apostrophized him in his mother-tongue, so violently that the poor fellow trembled all over. “By Jove!” I said to myself. “It’s owing to him and his inadvertence that _there are going about outside since last night, things that should not be there_--that’s certain.” When the execution was over, we went round the paddock. It contained a black bull and four cows of various kinds, the whole lot of whom, for no particular reason, followed after us. My dreadful relative began to joke: “Nicolas, let me introduce you to Jupiter; and here is the white Europa, the dun-colored Io, the fair-skinned Athor, and Pasiphaë clad in her robe of milk stained with ink, or ink stained with milk--whichever way you prefer.” This reference to libertine mythology made me smile. To tell the truth, I should have seized the first pretext to have a laugh; I had physical need of it. I also felt a hunger so intense that to satisfy it seemed the only question of any interest. The _château_ was the one and only attraction. It was there I should _eat_! And the attraction it exercised on me almost made me fail to examine the hothouse, its neighbor. That would have been a pity. They had added two halls of glass to it which flanked the original rotunda with their domed naves. Under its lowered outer blinds the building seemed to me to form a whole that was “perfect of its kind.” It suggested something between a Crystal Palace and a glass melon-bell; it had quite a grand and out-of-the-way appearance, if I may so say. A hothouse of this kind in this thicket! I should have been less astonished to find a love-philter in a monastery! * * * * * In the days of my late lamented aunt, the lion-room was reserved for guests. It had--it still has--three windows, with deep recesses as deep as alcoves. One of them looks out in the direction of the conservatory and has a balcony attached; the second opens on the park; I saw the paddock from it and further away the pond, and between the two that summerhouse which once was Briareus. The third window faces the eastern wing; from there I saw the window of my old room--shut--and the whole _façade_ of the _château_ blocking the view on the left.