Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very withered and very bent and
very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light
in them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had
bronzed it with its harvest suns and blown on it with its winter winds.
She wore always the same garb of homely dark-blue serge, always the same
tall white head-gear, always the same pure silver ear-rings that had
been at once an heirloom and a nuptial gift. She was always shod in her
wooden sabots, and she always walked abroad with a staff of ash. She had
been born in the Berceau de Dieu; had lived there and wedded there; had
toiled there all her life, and never left it for a greater distance than
a league, or for a longer time than a day. She loved it with an intense
love. The world beyond it was nothing to her; she scarcely believed in
it as existing. She could neither read nor write. She told the truth,
reared her offspring in honesty, and praised God always--had praised Him
when starving in a bitter winter after her husband's death, when there
had been no field work, and she had had five children to feed and
clothe; and praised Him now that her sons were all dead before her, and
all she had living of her blood was her grandson Bernadou.

Her life had been a hard one. Her parents had been hideously poor. Her
marriage had scarcely bettered her condition. She had laboured in the
fields always, hoeing and weeding and reaping and carrying wood and
driving mules, and continually rising with the first streak of daybreak.
She had known fever and famine and all manner of earthly ills. But now
in her old age she had peace. Two of her dead sons, who had sought their
fortunes in the other hemisphere, had left her a little money, and
she had a little cottage and a plot of ground, and a pig, and a small
orchard. She was well-to-do, and could leave it all to Bernadou; and for
ten years she had been happy, perfectly happy, in the coolness and the
sweetness and the old familiar ways and habits of the Berceau.