It was now almost seventeen years since Dr. Pascal, having resolved to
leave his little house in the new town, had bought La Souleiade for
twenty thousand francs, in order to live there in seclusion, and also
to give more space and more happiness to the little girl sent him by
his brother Saccard from Paris. This Souleiade, situated outside the
town gates on a plateau dominating the plain, was part of a large
estate whose once vast grounds were reduced to less than two hectares
in consequence of successive sales, without counting that the
construction of the railroad had taken away the last arable fields.
The house itself had been half destroyed by a conflagration and only
one of the two buildings remained--a quadrangular wing "of four
walls," as they say in Provence, with five front windows and roofed
with large pink tiles. And the doctor, who had bought it completely
furnished, had contented himself with repairing it and finishing the
boundary walls, so as to be undisturbed in his house.

Generally Clotilde loved this solitude passionately; this narrow
kingdom which she could go over in ten minutes, and which still
retained remnants of its past grandeur. But this morning she brought
there something like a nervous disquietude. She walked for a few
moments along the terrace, at the two extremities of which stood two
secular cypresses like two enormous funeral tapers, which could be
seen three leagues off. The slope then descended to the railroad,
walls of uncemented stones supporting the red earth, in which the last
vines were dead; and on these giant steps grew only rows of olive and
almond trees, with sickly foliage. The heat was already overpowering;
she saw the little lizards running about on the disjointed flags,
among the hairy tufts of caper bushes.

Then, as if irritated by the vast horizon, she crossed the orchard and