sunset. The time-worn look of everything, the deep silence of the
woods, the long perspective of the avenue, the forest in the distance,
the rusty iron-work, the masses of stone draped with velvet mosses,
all made poetry of this old structure, which still exists.

At the moment when our history begins Michu was leaning against a
mossy parapet on which he had laid his powder-horn, cap, handkerchief,
screw-driver, and rags,--in fact, all the utensils needed for his
suspicious occupation. His wife's chair was against the wall beside
the outer door of the house, above which could still be seen the arms
of the Simeuse family, richly carved, with their noble motto, "Cy
meurs." The old mother, in peasant dress, had moved her chair in front
of Madame Michu, so that the latter might put her feet upon the rungs
and keep them from dampness.

"Where's the boy?" said Michu to his wife.

"Round the pond; he is crazy about the frogs and the insects,"
answered the mother.

Michu whistled in a way that made his hearers tremble. The rapidity
with which his son ran up to him proved plainly enough the despotic
power of the bailiff of Gondreville. Since 1789, but more especially
since 1793, Michu had been well-nigh master of the property. The
terror he inspired in his wife, his mother-in-law, a servant-lad named
Gaucher, and the cook named Marianne, was shared throughout a
neighborhood of twenty miles in circumference. It may be well to give,
without further delay, the reasons for this fear,--all the more
because an account of them will complete the moral portrait of the
man.