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THE PORTRAIT IN MY UNCLE'S DINING-ROOM,
A TALK OP FRENCH SOCIETY UNDEB THE OLD KEOIME.
Translated from the French of Madame Charles Reybaud by Lady Georgiana Fullertan.
CHAPTER I.
DOM GERTJSAO AND HIS COUNTRY HOUSE.
DURING my college life, or rather more than thirty years
ago, I used to spend a part of my holidays with an uncle
of my mother's at a pretty country house in Upper Provence,
a few leagues from the Piedmontese frontier. This uncle of
mine was a Benedictine, wonderfully learned, and devoted to
his books. It was generaily agreed that he would have been
one of the glories of the celebrated Congregation of St. Maur,
if the Revolution had not driven him from his monastery just
as he had completed his novitiate.
Dom Gdrusac, as he was still called in his family, was only
twenty-five years old when the decree was issued which suppressed
all the religious communities in France. He did not
take advantage of this circumstance to mix with the world
again, nor did he, on the other hand, endeavor to return to the
religious life by retaining, like most of the members of his
Order, the habit of St. Benedict in a peaceful, charming, well-known picture. The house with its
white walls and red-tiled roof, over which a wreath of blue
smoke curled gracefully upward, then a little below the house
Spanish or Italian monastery.
When the storm of tne Revolution had in some measure
subsided, he collected together the remains of his paternal
inheritance, and took refuge in a little obscure corner of the
earth, to which he gave the high-sounding name of St. Pierre
the garden, green and gay as in the spring, and close to it the
orchard, with its fruit-trees bending beneath their load of red
apples
de Corbie, in remembrance of the famous House where the
first studious years of his youth had been spent. This little
and violet colored plums. And beyond this fair homescene
rose the beautiful mountains, crowned with forests of
oak, and their sides dotted with white sheep, the sounds of
whose bleating was faintly heard in the distance.
My good old uncle always met me with open arms, his first
question invariably was, " My dear boy, do you come loaded
with University honors ?" And when I informed him of my
successes, he never failed to congratulate me in a Latin speech.
After which he would notice my heated, tired appearance, and
hurrying me into the little sitting-room on the ground floor, he
called his old servant, Marian, and desired her to bring me a
glass of sugared wine, and to take my bundle up stairs.
The sight of Marian was the only drawback to my enjoyment
in arriving in this lovely place. She was certainly the ugliest
creature I ever set my eyes on. There was something grim,
sulky, and disagreeable about her looks, which I can hardly
describe, but that made her singularly repulsive. I could
never get over my aversion to this woman. When I was a little
fellow of eight or nine years old, I did not venture to look
Marian in the face, and later on I could never see her without
thinking of the characters in the infernal legends. Her stiff
property was concealed, as it were, in a bend of the Alps, on
the northern slope of the chain of mountains which gradually
descends to the mouth of the Var. It was a wild but yet
cheerful site. The house stood on a little eminence, behind
which rose a ridge of immense rocks, on the steep sides of
which grew some fine tufts of Spanish chestnuts, whilst its
deep crevices were filled with a multitude of shrubs. The
approach to it was by a winding road, bordered with willows
and poplars, forming on both sides a transparent curtain of
foliage, through which could be seen fields, olive-groves and
long trellised alleys of vines, which looked like green ribbons
of curious hues unrolled on the chalky soil.
The diligence used to set me down on the high-road at
about a good league's distance from my uncle's home, and I
then followed on foot the narrow lane into which no voiturier,
or coachman, had ever hazarded his vehicle. I was delighted
to make my way along this unfrequented path, carrying my
slender stock of clothes tied in a handkerchief, and with a
travelling stick in my hand, as if I had been a workman on his
tour through France.
I hastened my steps as I drew nearer, until at last, at the
entrance of the avenue, coming to a stand-still, I looked around
me with a de'.ight I c:in hardly describe, for each stony bank,
each tree, each little rivulet making its w:iy through
the thick
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