Monsieur de Varandeuil did not like them except
as she cooked them. But Monsieur de Varandeuil's decision to go into
retirement at L'Isle-Adam was mainly due, not to the pleasant
surroundings there, but to a project that he had formed. He had gone
thither to obtain leisure for a monumental work. That which he had been
unable to do for the honor and glory of Italian art by his collection,
he proposed to do by his pen. He had learned a little Italian with his
wife; he took it into his head to present Vasari's _Lives of the
Painters_ to the French public, to translate it with the assistance of
his daughter, who, when she was very small, had heard her mother's maid
speak Italian and had retained a few words. He plunged the girl into
Vasari, he locked up her time and her thoughts in grammars,
dictionaries, commentaries, all the works of all the scholiasts of
Italian art, kept her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the
_ennui_ and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the darkness
of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden of the book fell upon her;
when he had laid out her task, he would leave her tete-a-tete with the
volumes bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the neighborhood,
paying visits, gambling at some chateau or dining among the bourgeois of
his acquaintance, to whom he would complain pathetically of the
laborious effort that the vast undertaking of his translation entailed
upon him. He would return home, listen to the reading of the translation
made during the day, make comments and critical remarks, and upset a
sentence to give it a different meaning, which his daughter would
eliminate again when he had gone; then he would resume his walks and
jaunts, like a man who has well earned his leisure, walking very erect,
with his hat under his arm and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying
himself, the sky and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature
and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of impatience, common
to children and old men, would overtake him; he would demand a certain
number of pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter to sit
up half the night.

Two or three years passed in this labor, in which Sempronie's eyes were
ruined at last. She lived entombed in her father's Vasari, more entirely
alone than ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance from
the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and their manners _a la Madame
Angot_, and too poorly clad to v