He asked
himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the
people. It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a
world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question:
"Will a woman ever love me?"
To be loved! What a dream! One day he put this question to one of his
comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in
the neighborhood, who answered:
"Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are
loved even too much!"
Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but
softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left,
as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left
him.
Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of
political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at
Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his
father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing
again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy
balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its
living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from
the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to
trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the
wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative
or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice
wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him,
so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm--far
away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.
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