houses, like sponges, absorbed the humidity, which penetrating to the
interior, made the walls sweat from cellar to garret. Jeanne had left
the convent the day before, free for all time, ready to seize all the
joys of life, of which she had dreamed so long. She was afraid her
father would not set out for the new home in bad weather, and for the
hundredth time since daybreak she examined the horizon. Then she
noticed that she had omitted to put her calendar in her travelling
bag. She took from the wall the little card which bore in golden
figures the date of the current year, 1819. Then she marked with a
pencil the first four columns, drawing a line through the name of each
saint up to the 2d of May, the day that she left the convent. A voice
outside the door called "Jeannette." Jeanne replied, "Come in, papa."
And her father entered. Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was
a gentleman of the last century, eccentric and good. An enthusiastic
disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness of a lover
for nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of
aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a
philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated
tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. His great strength
and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms
enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that
gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness of inertia
that became almost a vice. A man of theory, he thought out a plan of
education for his daughter, to the end that she might become happy,
good, upright and gentle. She had lived at home until the age of
twelve, when, despite the tears of her mother, she was placed in the
Convent of the Sacred Heart. He had kept her severely secluded,
cloistered, in ignorance of the secrets of life. He wished the Sisters
to restore her to him pure at seventeen years of age, so that he might
imbue her mind with a sort of rational poetry, and by means of the