It is, then, with keen curiosity that one seeks for something which will explain this persistent faith in d'Argenson, nor is the quest in vain. Here and there among the pages of his Journal, buried amid much that is ephemeral and often worthless, one comes across passages which are perfect gems of feeling and expression. They show us d'Argenson at his best, and enable us to divine what is best in him. Among the first hundred pages there are at least three such episodes standing out in fine relief. One is the tale of the parrot that troubled the repose of the Intendant of Hainaut.[139] Another, even more charming and suggestive, is the story of Kakouin, the pet boar which was given him by St. Contest, his friend of the Entresol, and which came to such an untimely end.[140] Read in the light of many that follow, these pages reveal such a perfect beauty of heart, such a faultlessness of emotional touch, as is as rare as it is lovely; they spring, pure and clear, from the depths of the man's soul, wholly undarkened by that turgidity of feeling to which the enthusiasm of humanity afterwards gave birth. It was not alone to the pets of his own household that d'Argenson's heart was given. There was room in it left for the "brutes" of La Bruyère, "whose faces, when they rose upon their feet, were as the faces of men." One day, in the year 1725, he travelled four leagues to the village of Sezanne, through which the young Queen, Maria Leczinska, was to pass on her entry into France. His account of what he saw there forms the third of those pictures of this date which enable us to penetrate to the heart of the man, and to follow him afterwards with an unfailing respect. In the course of the narrative he says: "The harvest and the crops of all sorts were in danger of perishing; they could not be gathered for the continual rains; the poor labourer was looking out for a moment of dry weather in order to get them in. Yet for all that this whole district was beaten with several scourges. The peasants had been carried off to put the roads by which the Queen was to pass into fit condition; and they were only the worse, so much so that Her Majesty often thought she would drown; they had to drag her from her carriage by main force as they could. In several places she and her suite were swimming in the water, which lay over the whole country, and that in spite of the infinite pains expended by a tyrannical ministry."[141] And further on he says: "In the evening, after supper, I went for a stroll round the market-place of Sezanne. For a moment the rain had ceased. I spoke to some poor peasants, who had their horses with them, attached to the tail of a cart, and standing in the night without provender. Some of them told me that their horses had had nothing to eat for three days. They were harnessing ten in the place of four; judge how much of them remained!"[142]