M. Deviolaine was talking and smiling to the bees.
His mild tones succeeded, and they all flew off him, every single bee, not one of them stinging him; but when the last had flown away, and he raised his eyes, and discovered his wife, his children, and his servants all perched on the kitchen steps looking at him, there was such an outburst of "mille tonnerres" and other oaths that the household did not recover for a week after!
As for us, we disappeared like magic; one would have thought the ground had opened beneath our feet and swallowed us up.
The remarkable fact about all these tempests was, that they ended in nothing worse than clouds and lightning, without any hailstones or thunderbolts. No one ever remembered seeing M. Deviolaine even kick out at his dog—unless the beast were well outside the reach of his foot.
M. Deviolaine possessed another house besides this one; it was called St. Remy, and stood in the middle of a charming little plateau, surrounded on all sides by the forest.
St. Remy specially deserves a few words; the days we went there were fête days indeed!
St. Remy had once been a nunnery, but I do not know to what order it had belonged. I only remember the portrait of the abbess, in a frame above the chimney-piece in the large hall. She was a beautiful woman, clothed entirely in black, with a blue cord round her to which was attached a cross; she was round and plump, stout with the corpulence only to be found among buxom saints. She bore some titled name known in those parts, which I forget.
The convent had been in use until 1791 or 1792; then the laws came into force which destroyed cloistered life, and all these doves of the Lord had to flee: I believe M. Deviolaine bought the convent as ecclesiastical property.
There was an immense cloister attached to this convent—though not so large perhaps in reality as in my remembrance of it: children's eyes see strange hallucinations in the region of memory—space, to their minds, is infinite.
Outside this cloister were great staircases, with iron bannisters, leading to the former apartments of the abbess. Only a portion of these had been fitted up, the rest belonged to rats and cats, which appeared to have settled a truce, for they lived together on a pretty good understanding.