On the east side of the hall-way was our dining room, a simple room with just straw-bottomed chairs, an immense oak side-board, royally set out with glass and blue plates, and on the walls quaint expressionless portraits of our people, including mother and father, a fat uncle with a pipe, and half closed eye, and a great grandfather in the regimentals of the Revolution—very brave looking and handsome—and some very staring aunts, and great aunts in starched finery, that made them look like owls.
Back of the pantry was the kitchen, with old Hortense, as the high priestess and oracle—our own dear Hortense, with such a kind heart, and a ready ear, and a generous hand—Ah! how we children loved her, and how she loved us, and how she packed our napkins for school, or our baskets for picnics—as the Americans say. She used to shake her wise old head slyly at us when we looked in at the kitchen door, with that little hungry grin on our faces:
"Certainement, you are veery hungree. Oh I know—it is a great pity and there is nothing, Vraiment—nothing—but See! I do so," and her long fingers snapped, and she waved them in an appeal to space, and then she cautiously raised a big bowl and Voila! a nest of crisp, aromatic, yellow buns, or cookies, or gateaux aux raisins, so good, so inexpressibly good!
And upstairs were the pleasant bed-rooms, so inviting to repose in their demure neatness, with high posters and pavilions, and their broad bottomed rockers, and their rainbow wallpapers, and rag carpet strips, over the bronzed, aged, and russety black wooden floors.
My own room was over the library; it looked north and west, and I would hang out of its window for half an hour at a time, watching the red sun quench itself behind the golden and flaming horizon, whose secrets I yearned to know, whose untrodden wonders I dreamed to penetrate. Those wistful hours awoke the unconfessed but sleepless passion of my heart to sail out over the Atlantic, a passion too of unrest, linked in my disposition with ecstacies and imaginations.
Sister Gabrielle was in the next room to mine, and in her sweet, tasteful, fresh and white bed-room, rose the chimney from the library fire-place below—so that she had her own chimney corner too, in the second story of the house and THERE—Well, wait, that comes later.
Our parents were nervously alert in nature, intelligent and conscientious. In them a strain of Huguenot puritanism was combined with an intellectual appetite that seemed to create in each a physical activity that made them restless in manner, and weak in health. They watched my sister and myself too suspiciously, and their affection became almost an aggravation of kindness, and solicitude, and curiosity, which made me more eager to escape that protecting roof-tree, and see the world. On my sister, as I shall explain, it exercised the most unfortunate influence, and accentuated that peculiar neurosis whose roots—as I was to learn later—were enlaced in a sub-conscious sensitivity to occult and invisible agencies, which indeed I helped to strengthen.
We were provided with neighbors and friends, and while the village of St. Choiseul was sufficiently democratic to tolerate and encourage friendly intercourse with everyone, as a matter of congeniality and temperamental tastes, we knew intimately but five persons in St. Choiseul. These five composed a contrasted and picturesque group, and when all were assembled in our big library, father and mother seemed to me most attractive, for in converse that was stimulating and personal, they attained a serenity of feeling and manner, that made them really delightful. Let me quickly describe our friends.