The little St. Hermangardes, of whom every one spoke so often, arrived
about the middle of September. Their castle was situated in the north
upon the bank of the Carreze, but they came every year to pass the
autumn in their very old and dilapidated mansion near my uncle's house.
Two boys, both a little older than I, came this time, and contrary to
my expectation I took a fancy to them immediately. As they were in the
habit of spending a part of each year at their country place they had
guns and powder and often went hunting. Thus they brought an entirely
new element into our games. Their estate of Bories became one of the
centres of our operations. Everything there was at our disposal,
the servants and all the animals in the stables. One of our favorite
amusements was the construction of enormous balloons, nine or ten feet
high, and these we inflated by burning under them sheaves of hay; we
then watched them rise and sail away and away, until they were lost to
our sight high above the distant fields and woods.
The little St. Hermangardes were unlike other children; they had had
all their instruction from a tutor, and their ideas were different from
those one imbibes at boarding schools. When there was any disagreement
between us in regard to our games they always courteously gave in to me,
and therefore my contact with them did not help me to meet the painful
experiences of the future.
One day they came over and with much grace made me a present of a very
rare butterfly. It was of a pale yellow color, almost merging into light
green, the yellow of a very ordinary butterfly, but its front wings
were a shaded and exquisite pink, similar to the delicate rosy tints
sometimes seen at daybreak. They had captured it, they said, in the
late-ripening autumn grain fields of Bories,--they had caught hold of it
so deftly and carefully that their fingers had made no impression upon
its brilliant coloring. When, at about noontime, I received it from them
I was in the vestibule of my uncle's house, a place always kept tightly
closed during the hours of intense heat. From the wing of the house
I heard my cousin singing in the thin and plaintive falsetto of a
mountaineer; he often sang in that manner, and when he did so his voice
always gave me a feeling of unusual melancholy as it broke the stillness
of the late September noons. He sang over and over the same old refrain:
“Ah! Ah! The good, good story. . . .” Here he always broke off and
recommenced. And from that moment Bories, the pinkish-yellow butterfly,
and the sad little refrain of the “good, good story” were inseparably
associated in my memory.
But I fear that I have said too much about the incoherent impressions
and images which came to me so frequently in days gone by; this is the
last time that I will speak at length of them. But it will be seen,
because of what follows, how important it is for me to note the
association existing between the dissimilar things mentioned above.