Our household comprised, besides my father and mother, the following members, whom I will enumerate in the order of importance they filled in my own mind:—
1st. A large black dog called Truffe, who was privileged to be welcomed everywhere, because he allowed me to ride him regularly.
2nd. A gardener named Pierre, who used to provide me with frogs and grass snakes, reptiles I was extremely inquisitive about.
3rd. A negro, my father's valet, named Hippolyte, pretty much a black simpleton, whose queer sayings became family bywords, which my father treasured up, I believe, to use in a series of stories meant to rival the tomfooleries of Brunet.
4th. A guardsman called Mocquet, for whom I had a profound admiration, because every evening he would relate magnificent stories of his deeds of prowess, stories which were immediately interrupted if the general appeared on the scenes—the general not having such a great opinion of these deeds as the narrator had himself.
5th. A kitchen girl named Marie. This last creature is totally lost in the twilight mists of my memory. She is just a name which I heard given to some indistinct figure, now a mere blurred form in my memory; so far as I can remember, she was in nowise a sylph.
Truffe died of old age towards the end of 1805, and Mocquet and Pierre buried him in a corner of the garden. This was the first funeral I had seen, and I wept very bitterly over the old friend of my early days.
My next recollections are confused half flashes in the semidarkness of early memories, and quite dateless.
One day when I was playing in the garden Pierre called me, and I ran to him. Whenever Pierre called me it always meant that he had found something worthy of my notice. Indeed, he had just discovered a snake in a meadow by the roadside, and it had a great lump in its stomach. With one blow of his spade he cut the snake in half, and out of the reptile hopped a frog, a trifle dazed by the beginning of the digestive process of which it had been the victim. It soon revived, stretched out its legs one after the other, yawned prodigiously, and began to leap; slowly at first, then more quickly and, at last, as fast as though nothing whatever had happened to it.
This phenomenon, which I have never again seen, impressed me so much, and remains in my mind so vividly, that if I close my eyes I can see as I write these lines the two wriggling portions of the snake, the frog still motionless, and Pierre leaning upon his spade, smiling at my astonishment, just as clearly as though Pierre, the frog, and the snake were still before my eyes—only Pierre's features are almost effaced by time, like a badly-taken photograph.