tly, that he saw me--for the last time. It was, as I
have already said, at the time when my mother had a three months' leave
from exile, which she was spending in the house of her brother, and
friends and relations were coming from far and near to do her honour.
It is inconceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not have been of the
number. The little child a few months old he had taken up in his arms on
the day of his home-coming, after years of war and exile, was confessing
her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her turn. I do not
know whether he was present on the very day of our departure.

I have already admitted that for me he is more especially the man who
in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of
snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene.
A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression
of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily buttoned up to the throat,
is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague
shadow pursued by the memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving
human being, I suppose, of all those he had seen in the course of his
taciturn life.

But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The
elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-horses,
standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns,
four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups
of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest
neighbourhood, a perfect silence; on all the faces an air of sober
concentration; my grandmother, all in black, gazing stoically; my uncle
giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been
placed already; at the top of the flight my little cousin in a short
skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a
small princess attended by the women of her own household; the head
gouvernante, our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty
years in the service of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor
attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression,
and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
meeting over a short, thick nose, and a complexion like pale-brown
paper. Of all the eyes turned toward the carriage, her good-natured eyes
only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that
broke the silence with an appeal to me