How, you must know that the last house of the village, whose square front is pierced by two glazed casements, and whose low door opens on to the muddy street, belonged in 1813 to Jean-Claude Hullin, an old volunteer of '92, but at that time a shoemaker in the village of Charmes, and held in high esteem among the simple mountaineers. Hullin was a short, stout, thick-set man, with gray eyes, thick lips, a short nose, with a strongly-marked division at the end, and thick, grayish eyebrows. He was a jovial, good-natured fellow, and didn't know how to refuse anything to his daughter, Louise, a child whom he had rescued from a troop of those wretched _heimatshlos_--half-tinkers, half-blacksmiths[2]--who travel from village to village, soldering saucepans, melting spoons, and mending broken crockery. He looked upon her as his own daughter, and had completely forgotten that she was not of his blood. Besides Louise, the worthy man had other objects of affection. He loved, above all, his cousin, the old mistress of the farm of Bois-de-Chênes, Catherine Lefévre, and her son, Gaspard, drawn in that year's conscription, a handsome young fellow, betrothed to Louise, and whose return at the end of the campaign was anxiously expected by all the family. Hullin always dwelt proudly on the memory of his campaigns of Sambro-et-Meuse, of Italy, and Egypt. Sometimes of an evening, when his day's work was done, he would set off to the great saw-works at Valtin, formed of the trunks of trees still covered with their bark, and which you can perceive down below there at the bottom of the gorge. There, seated in the midst of the woodcutters, charcoal-burners, and _schlitteurs_,[3] opposite the great fire made of sawdust and shavings, and whilst the heavy wheel went for ever round, amid the never-ceasing thunder of the mill-dam and the constant grinding of the saw, with his elbow on his knee, and pipe in mouth, he would talk to them of Hoche, of Kleber, and finally, of General Bonaparte, whom he had seen a hundred times, and whose spare figure, piercing eyes, and eagle glance he could paint to the very life. Such was Jean-Claude Hullin. He was a man of the old Gallic stock, loving extraordinary adventures and hair-breadth 'scapes, but sticking to work from a principle of duty, from year's end to year's end.