statues and urns,
uprooted the centenary trees, dried up the sparkling fountains that
plashed noisily in their bowls. Then the bright southern sun, humming
and vibrating, outlined upon the gravel of a path, or against the white
supporting wall of a terrace, that tall old woman's figure, slender and
straight as her distaff, picking up pieces of dead wood, breaking off a
branch from a shrub that was out of line, heedless of the scorching
reflection which affected her tough skin no more than an old stone
bench. About that hour another promenader appeared in the park, less
active, less bustling, dragging himself along rather than walking,
leaning on the walls and railings, a poor bent, palsied creature, with
a lifeless face to which one could assign no age, who, when he was
tired, uttered a faint, plaintive cry to call the servant, who was
always at hand to assist him to sit down, to huddle himself up on some
step, where he would remain for hours, motionless and silent, his mouth
half-open, blinking his eyes, soothed by the strident monotony of the
locusts, a human blot on the face of the superb landscape.

He was the _oldest_, Bernard's brother, the cherished darling of the
Jansoulets, father and mother, the hope and the glory of the family of
the junk-dealer, who, faithful like so many more in the South to the
superstition concerning the right of primogeniture, had made every
conceivable sacrifice to send that handsome, ambitious youth to Paris;
and he had started with four or five marshals' batons in his trunk, the
admiration of all the girls in the village; but Paris--after it had
beaten and twisted and squeezed that brilliant Southern rag in its
great vat for ten years, burned him in all its acids, rolled him in all
its mire--relegated him at last to the state of battered flotsam and
jetsam, embruted, paralyzed, which had killed his father with grief and
compelled his mother to sell everything in her house and to live by
domestic service in the well-to-do families of the neighborhood.
Luckily, just about the time that that relic of Parisian hospitals,
sent back to his home by public charity, appeared in Bourg-Saint-Andeol,
Bernard,--who was called Cadet, as in all the half-Arab Southern
families, where the eldest son always takes the family name and the
last comer the name of Cadet,--Bernard was already in Tunis, in process
of making his fortune, and sending money home regularly. But what
remorse it caused the poor mo