A long line of ancestors must have reigned before him, to judge by the portraits in the drawing room. Most of these portraits were now much blackened, so that unless there was a flood of light it was pretty difficult to guess what the frames held. One of the most defaced of them was the one that most commanded my admiration. Only the face and one hand were visible--they might have been a woman’s face and hand; but I had been told of the important part their owner had borne in the wars, and I wondered how so young and handsome a man could have fought so much. The lady with the rose attracted me, too. No matter on what side of her I stood, from every side she smiled upon me and showed me her flower. I pass over certain stem faces trussed up in high collars, swathed in huge neckcloths, as if afflicted with colds, and come to two portraits which occupied the place of honour on the right and left of the chimney. One wore a blue coat laced with silver, a scarlet waistcoat, white knee breeches and the three-cornered hat of the French Guard. The other wore the bear-skin cap and the blue great coat with gilt buttons and red braid on sleeves and collar of a grenadier of the Old Guard. The soldier of the King and the soldier of the Emperor were companion pictures. To judge by their decorations, both had well served France. Father had proudly told me of their exploits, and explained their grade. I could not look at them without a sort of reverential fear. They were not handsome, having more bone than flesh, and features all out of drawing, but I should not have dared to call them ugly. Their eyes, severely fixed upon me, troubled me. They reproached me for not having achieved wonderful victories like that of the grenadier at Moscow, or for at least not having undergone heroic defeat like the French Guard at Malplaquet. For a long time these two were the only names of battles that I knew. And I used to blush for Tem Bossette’s wooden sabres and the laths that I bestrode. I understood that my feats of horsemanship in the garden were not serious, were not real. Those two redoubtable portraits sometimes puffed me up with pride and again overwhelmed me with their importance. One day when I was gazing upon them with some uneasiness grandfather came by, and with his little dry smile and his most impertinent pursing of the lips, let fall the words, “Pooh! They are only bad paintings.” It is dangerous to teach too much esthetics to a child. I was glad that they were bad paintings. In a moment the soldier of the King with his three-cornered hat and the soldier of the Emperor with his bear-skin cap lost all their fascination. Thenceforth their story was nothing to me. I was set free from the servitude of a compelled admiration. I at once felt my superiority over a badly painted past, and could judge the gallery of ancestors with insolence. One day the subject of exiling them to the garret was agitated. Grandfather desired to replace them with engravings.