John, calmly seated near his culverin, would pick off
a gentleman from time to time, and at once regain, as he said, his
sleeping and eating power, which want of exercise had taken from him.
And he would even climb up to his beloved platform without waiting for
the excuse of an attack, and there, crouching down like a cat ready to
spring, as soon as he saw any one appear in the distance without giving
the signal, he would try his skill upon the target, and make the man
retrace his steps. This he called sweeping the path clean.

As I was too young to accompany my uncles on their hunting and
plundering expeditions, John naturally became my guardian and
tutor--that is to say, my jailor and tormentor. I will not give you all
the details of that infernal existence. For nearly ten years I endured
cold, hunger, insults, the dungeon, and blows, according to the more or
less savage caprices of this monster. His fierce hatred of me arose
from the fact that he could not succeed in depraving me; my rugged,
headstrong, and unsociable nature preserved me from his vile seductions.
It is possible that I had not any strong tendencies to virtue; to hatred
I luckily had. Rather than do the bidding of my tyrant I would have
suffered a thousand deaths. And so I grew up without conceiving any
affection for vice. However, my notions about society were so strange
that my uncles' mode of life did not in itself cause me any repugnance.
Seeing that I was brought up behind the walls of Roche-Mauprat, and that
I lived in a state of perpetual siege, you will understand that I had
precisely such ideas as any armed retainer in the barbarous ages of
feudalism might have had. What, outside our den, was termed by other men
assassinating, plundering, and torturing, I was taught to call fighting,
conquering, and subduing. My sole knowledge of history consisted of
an acquaintance with certain legends and ballads of chivalry which my
grandfather used to repeat to me of an evening, when he had time to
think of what he was pleased to call my education. Whenever I asked him
any question about the present time, he used to answer that times had
sadly changed, that all Frenchmen had become traitors and felons, that
they had frightened their kings, and that these, like cravens, had
deserted the nobles, who in their turn had been cowardly enough to
renounce their privileges and let laws be made for them by clodhoppers.
I listened with surprise, almost with indignatio