Pierre Gascon
Pierre Gascon was old, so old that he seemed to have drifted into a backwater of time, and to lie there forgotten. His age had grown upon him imperceptibly. He had not felt its steady besiegement, like other men, in the waning of the vital fires of life; it was only something more placid than his youth; a time of less excursive contemplation, a season of calm more wholly personal than before. He had deliberately shut out the world, and knew it only by rumour as a place where people committed intolerable follies both of body and mind, rearing children to reap what they had sown, loving with preposterous fatuity and a devotion, Pierre Gascon in his blind soul believed, a hundred times more worthy than its object.
He lived in a great house surrounded by a beautiful and luxuriant garden, enclosed by high walls. It was not far from a busy city, and on silent evenings as he sat under his lime trees, the humming of the restless hive reached him in an unvarying undertone. Sometimes, on clear mornings, he caught the gleam of distant spires—the symbols, in his eyes, of a vain and idle worship. He argued with the almost divine assumption of lack of knowledge, and for many years had held himself the only true philosopher.
Pierre Gascon's face bore none of the marks that blazon a man's
