Besides which, every now and then, if things didn't go quite as he wished, he would fly into comic rages, and become quite violent and intractable for at least five minutes, and for quite five minutes more he would silently sulk. And then, just as suddenly, he would forget all about it, and become once more the genial, affectionate, and caressing creature he always was.
But this is going ahead too fast! revenons. At the examinations this year Barty was almost brilliant, and I was hopeless as usual; my only consolation being that after the holidays we should at last be in the same class together, en quatrième, and all through this hopelessness of mine!
Laferté was told by his father that he might invite two of his school‑fellows to their country‑house for the vacation, so he asked Josselin and Bussy‑Rabutin. But Bussy couldn't go—and, to my delight, I went instead.
That ride all through the sweet August night, the three of us on the impériale of the five‑horsed diligence, just behind the conductor and the driver—and freedom, and a full moon, or nearly so—and a tremendous saucisson de Lyon (à l'ail, bound in silver paper)—and petits pains—and six bottles of bière de Mars—and cigarettes ad libitum, which of course we made ourselves!
The Lafertés lived in the Department of La Sarthe, in a delightful country‑house, with a large garden sloping down to a transparent stream, which had willows and alders and poplars all along its both banks, and a beautiful country beyond.
Outside the grounds (where there were the old brick walls, all overgrown with peaches and pears and apricots, of some forgotten mediæval convent) was a large farm; and close by, a water‑mill that never stopped.
A road, with thick hedge‑rows on either side, led to a small and very pretty town called La Tremblaye, three miles off. And hard by the garden gates began the big forest of that name: one heard the stags calling, and the owls hooting, and the fox giving tongue as it hunted the hares at night. There might have been wolves and wild‑boars. I like to think so very much.
M. Laferté was a man of about fifty—entre les deux âges; a retired maître de forges, or iron‑master, or else the son of one: I forget which. He had a charming wife and two pretty little daughters, Jeanne et Marie, aged fourteen and twelve.
He seldom moved from his country home, which was called "Le Gué des Aulnes," except to go shooting in the forest; for he was a great sportsman and cared for little else. He was of gigantic stature—six foot six or seven, and looked taller still, as he had a very small head and high shoulders. He was not an Adonis, and could only see out of one eye—the other (the left one, fortunately) was fixed as if it were made of glass—perhaps it was—and this gave him a stern and rather forbidding expression of face.
He had just been elected Mayor of La Tremblaye, beating the Comte de la Tremblaye by many votes. The Comte was a royalist and not popular. The republican M. Laferté (who was immensely charitable and very just) was very popular indeed, in spite of a morose and gloomy manner. He could even be violent at times, and then he was terrible to see and hear. Of course his wife and daughters were gentleness itself, and so was his son, and everybody who came into contact with him. Si vis pacem, para bellum, as Père Brossard used to impress upon us.