structive records, comforting too and pious, would be the
family papers that should tell us who our forebears were and speak to
us of their patient struggles with harsh fate, their stubborn efforts to
build up, atom by atom, what we are today. No story would come up with
that for individual interest. But by the very force of things the home
is abandoned; and, when the brood has flown, the nest is no longer
recognized.

I, a humble journeyman in the toilers' hive, am therefore very poor in
family recollections. In the second degree of ancestry, my facts become
suddenly obscured. I will linger over them a moment for two reasons:
first, to inquire into the influence of heredity; and, secondly, to
leave my children yet one more page concerning them.

I did not know my maternal grandfather. This venerable ancestor was, I
have been told, a process server in one of the poorest parishes of the
Rouergue. He used to engross on stamped paper in a primitive spelling.
With his well-filled pen case and ink horn, he went drawing out deeds up
hill and down dale, from one insolvent wretch to another more insolvent
still. Amid his atmosphere of pettifoggery, this rudimentary scholar,
waging battle on life's acerbities, certainly paid no attention to the
insect; at most, if he met it, he would crush it under foot. The
unknown animal, suspected of evil doing, deserved no further enquiry.
Grandmother, on her side, apart from her housekeeping and her beads,
knew still less about anything. She looked on the alphabet as a set of
hieroglyphics only fit to spoil your sight for nothing, unless you were
scribbling on paper bearing the government stamp. Who in the world, in
her day, among the small folk, dreamt of knowing how to read and write?
That luxury was reserved for the attorney, who himself made but a
sparing use of it. The insect, I need hardly say, was the least of her
cares. If sometimes, when rinsing her salad at the tap, she found a
caterpillar on the lettuce leaves, with a start of fright she would
fling the loathsome thing away, thus cutting short relations reputed
dangerous. In short, to both my maternal grandparents, the insect was a
creature of no interest whatever and almost always a repulsive object,
which one dared not touch with the tip of one's finger. Beyond a doubt,
my taste for animals was not derived from them.

I have more precise information regarding my grandparents on the
father's side, for their green old age allow