out stone benches rose up here and there like ancient tombs. And I also remember myself, a sickly child, in a smock frock of lustring, running across this gloom of forsaken things, lacerating myself in the blackberry bush, torturing the animals in the backyard or for entire days sitting in the kitchen and watching Felix who served as our gardener, valet, and coachman.
Years and years have passed. Everything that I loved is now dead. Everything that I knew has taken on a new appearance. The church has been rebuilt. It now has an embellished doorway, arched windows, fancy gutter-spouts representing flaming mouths of demons; its new brick belfry laughs gaily into the blue; in place of the old house there now rises an elaborate Swiss cottage built by the new proprietor who, in the enclosure, has increased the number of colored glass balls, small cascades and plaster statues of Love, soiled by rain. But things and people are engraved so profoundly upon my memory that time could not apply a burnisher hard enough to erase them.
I want, from now on, to speak of my parents not as I knew them when I was a child, but such as they would appear to me now, completed by memory, humanized, so to speak, by intimacy and revelation, in all the crudity of life, in all the immediacy of impression which the inexorable experiences of life lend to persons too unhesitatingly loved and too closely known.
My father was a notary public. Since time immemorial it had been so with the Mintié family. It would have appeared monstrous, almost revolutionary, if a member of the Mintié family had dared to break this family tradition and had renounced the scutcheons of gilt wood which were transmitted religiously from one generation to another like some title of nobility. At Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres and the surrounding coun-
