ble threads.

.......................

What had happened was this. After the visit of the musician and the
philosopher, Jean Jacques, to sustain his reputation and to increase it,
had decided to visit that Normandy from which his people had come at the
time of Frontenac. He set forth with much 'eclat' and a little innocent
posturing and ritual, in which a cornet and a violin figured, together
with a farewell oration by the Cure.

In Paris Jean Jacques had found himself bewildered and engulfed. He had
no idea that life could be so overbearing, and he was inclined to resent
his own insignificance. However, in Normandy, when he read the names on
the tombstones and saw the records in the baptismal register of other
Jean Jacques Barbilles, who had come and gone generations before, his
self-respect was somewhat restored. This pleasure was dashed, however,
by the quizzical attitude of the natives of his ancestral parish,
who walked round about inspecting him as though he were a zoological
specimen, and who criticized his accent--he who had been at Laval for
one whole term; who had had special instruction before that time from
the Old Cure and a Jesuit brother; and who had been the friend of
musicians and philosophers!

His cheerful, kindly self-assurance stood the test with difficulty, but
it became a kind of ceremonial with him, whenever he was discomfited, to
read some pages of a little dun-coloured book of philosophy, picked up
on the quay at Quebec just before he sailed, and called, "Meditations in
Philosophy." He had been warned by the bookseller that the Church had no
love for philosophy; but while at Laval he had met the independent minds
that, at eighteen to twenty-two, frequent academic groves; and he
was not to be put off by the pious bookseller--had he not also had a
philosopher in his house the year before, and was he not going to Nantes
to see this same savant before returning to his beloved St. Saviour's
parish.

But Paris and Nantes and Rouen and Havre abashed and discomfited him,
played havoc with his self-esteem, confused his brain, and vexed him
by formality, and, more than all, by their indifference to himself. He
admired, yet he wished to be admired; he was humble, but he wished all
people and things to be humble with him. When he halted he wanted the
world to halt; when he entered a cathedral--Notre Dame or any other; or
a great building--the Law Courts at Rouen or any other; he simply
wanted