The Lafertés lived in the Department of La Sarthe, in a delightful country‑house, with a large garden sloping down to a transparent stream, which had willows and alders and poplars all along its both banks, and a beautiful country beyond.
Outside the grounds (where there were the old brick walls, all overgrown with peaches and pears and apricots, of some forgotten mediæval convent) was a large farm; and close by, a water‑mill that never stopped.
A road, with thick hedge‑rows on either side, led to a small and very pretty town called La Tremblaye, three miles off. And hard by the garden gates began the big forest of that name: one heard the stags calling, and the owls hooting, and the fox giving tongue as it hunted the hares at night. There might have been wolves and wild‑boars. I like to think so very much.
M. Laferté was a man of about fifty—entre les deux âges; a retired maître de forges, or iron‑master, or else the son of one: I forget which. He had a charming wife and two pretty little daughters, Jeanne et Marie, aged fourteen and twelve.
He seldom moved from his country home, which was called "Le Gué des Aulnes," except to go shooting in the forest; for he was a great sportsman and cared for little else. He was of gigantic stature—six foot six or seven, and looked taller still, as he had a very small head and high shoulders. He was not an Adonis, and could only see out of one eye—the other (the left one, fortunately) was fixed as if it were made of glass—perhaps it was—and this gave him a stern and rather forbidding expression of face.
He had just been elected Mayor of La Tremblaye, beating the Comte de la Tremblaye by many votes. The Comte was a royalist and not popular. The republican M. Laferté (who was immensely charitable and very just) was very popular indeed, in spite of a morose and gloomy manner. He could even be violent at times, and then he was terrible to see and hear. Of course his wife and daughters were gentleness itself, and so was his son, and everybody who came into contact with him. Si vis pacem, para bellum, as Père Brossard used to impress upon us.
It was the strangest country household I have ever seen, in France or anywhere else. They were evidently very well off, yet they preferred to eat their mid‑day meal in the kitchen, which was immense; and so was the mid-day meal—and of a succulency! …
An old wolf‑hound always lay by the huge log fire; often with two or three fidgety cats fighting for the soft places on him and making him growl; five or six other dogs, non‑sporting, were always about at meal‑time.
The servants—three or four peasant women who waited on us—talked all the time; and were tutoyées by the family. Farm‑laborers came in and discussed agricultural matters, manures, etc., quite informally, squeezing their bonnets de coton in their hands. The postman sat by the fire and drank a glass of cider and smoked his pipe up the chimney while the letters were read—most of them out loud—and were commented upon by everybody in the most friendly spirit. All this made the meal last a long time.
M. Laferté always wore his blouse—except in the evening, and then he wore a brown woollen vareuse, or jersey; unless there were guests, when he wore his Sunday morning best. He nearly always spoke like a peasant, although he was really a decently educated man—or should have been.
His old mother, who was of good family and eighty years of age, lived in a quite humble cottage in a small street in La Tremblaye, with two little peasant girls to wait on her; and the La Tremblayes, with whom M. Laferté was not on speaking terms, were always coming into the village to see her and bring her fruit and flowers and game. She was a most accomplished old lady, and an excellent musician, and had known Monsieur de Lafayette.
We breakfasted with her when we alighted from the diligence at six in the morning; and she took such a fancy to Barty that her own grandson was almost forgotten. He sang to her, and she sang to him, and showed him autograph letters of Lafayette, and a lock of her hair when she was seventeen, and old‑fashioned miniatures of her father and mother, Monsieur and Madame de something I've quite forgotten.
M. Laferté kept a pack of bassets (a kind of bow‑legged beagle), and went shooting with them every day in the forest, wet or dry; sometimes we three boys with him. He lent us guns—an old single‑barrelled flint‑lock cavalry musket or carbine fell to my share; and I knew happiness such as I had never known yet.
Barty was evidently not meant for a sportsman. On a very warm August morning, as he and I squatted "à l'affût" at the end of a long straight ditch outside a thicket which the bassets were hunting, we saw a hare running full tilt at us along the ditch, and we both fired together. The hare shrieked, and turned a big somersault and fell on its back and kicked convulsively—its legs still galloping—and its face and neck were covered with blood; and, to my astonishment, Barty became quite hysterical with grief at what we had done. It's the only time I ever saw him cry.
"Caïn! Caïn! qu'as‑tu fait de ton frère?" he shrieked again and again, in a high voice, like a small child's—like the hare's.
I calmed him down and promised I wouldn't tell, and he recovered himself and bagged the game—but he never came out shooting with us again! So I inherited his gun, which was double‑barrelled.
Barty's accomplishments soon became the principal recreation of the Laferté ladies; and even M. Laferté himself would start for the forest an hour or two later or come back an hour sooner to make Barty go through his bag of tricks. He would have an arm‑chair brought out on the lawn after breakfast and light his short black pipe and settle the programme himself.
First, "le saut périlleux"—the somersault backwards—over and over again, at intervals of two or three minutes, so as to give himself time for thought and chuckles, while he smoked his pipe in silent stodgy jubilation.
Then, two or three songs—they would be stopped, if M. Laferté didn't like them, after the first verse, and another one started instead; and if it pleased him, it was encored two or three times.
Then, pen and ink and paper were brought, and a small table and a kitchen chair, and Barty had to draw caricatures, of which M. Laferté chose the subject.
"Maintenant, fais‑moi le profil de mon vieil ami M. Bonzig, que j' n' connais pas, que j' n'ai jamais vu, mais q' j'aime beaucoup." (Now do me the side face of my old friend M. Bonzig, whom I don't know, but am very fond of.)
And so on for twenty minutes.
Then Barty had to be blindfolded and twisted round and round, and point out the north—when he felt up to it.
Then a pause for reflection.
Then: "Dis‑moi qué'q' chose en anglais."
"How do you do very well hey diddle‑diddle Chichester church in Chichester church‑yard!" says Barty.
"Qué'q' çà veut dire?"
"Il s'agit d'une église et d'un cimetière!" says Barty—rather sadly, with a wink at me.
"C'est pas gai! Qué vilaine langue, hein? J' suis joliment content que j' sais pas I'anglais, moi!" (It's not lively! What a beastly language, eh? I'm precious glad I don't know English.)
Then: "Démontre‑moi un problème de géométrie."
Barty would then do a simple problem out of Legendre (the French Euclid), and M. Laferté would look on with deep interest and admiration, but evidently no comprehension whatever. Then he would take the pen himself, and draw a shapeless figure, with A's and B's and C's and D's stuck all over it in impossible places, and quite at hazard, and say:
"Démontre‑moi que A + B est plus grand que C + D." It was mere idiotic nonsense, and he didn't know better!
But Barty would manage to demonstrate it all the same, and M. Laferté would sigh deeply, and exclaim, "C'est joliment beau, la géométrie!"
Then: "Danse!"
And Barty danced "la Paladine," and did Scotch reels and Irish jigs and break‑downs of his own invention, amidst roars of laughter from all the family.
Finally the