"Bless my soul!" they said. "How is it that no one was able to answer you sooner? Everybody remembers them, remembers your parents. But people are stupid in these parts; and then, when strangers come in this way, it isn't surprising that people should hesitate to talk."
Yves' father had left in the country round a reputation a little legendary of a kind of giant of rare beauty, who was never able to conform to the ways of others.
"What a pity, sir, that such a man should so often go astray! It was the tavern that ruined him, your poor father; for all that, he was very fond of his wife and children, he was very gentle with them, and in the country round everybody loved him except M. le Curé."
"Except M. le Curé!" Yves repeated to me in a low voice, becoming serious. "You see it is what I told you, on the subject of my baptism."
"One day, there was a battle, here on the square, in 1848, for the revolution; your father withstood single-handed the market people and saved the life of the Mayor."
"He had a big horse," said the hostess, "which was so wild that no one dared to approach it. And people kept out of the way, I assure you, when he passed mounted on the beast."
"Ah!" said Yves, struck suddenly with a recollection which seemed to have come to him from a great distance. "I remember that horse, and I recall that my father used to lift me up and sit me on it when it was tied in the stable. It is the first recollection I have of my father and I can just picture a little his face. The horse was black, was it not, with white hoofs?"
"That's it! That's it," said the old woman. "Black with white hoofs. It was a wild beast, and, bless my soul! what an idea for a sailor to have a horse!"
The inn is full of men drinking cider. They make a cheerful noise of glasses and Breton conversations. And gradually they gather round and make a sort of circle about us.
The hostess has four granddaughters, all alike, and all ravishingly pretty in their white coifs. They do not look like daughters of an inn. They are the perfect type of the handsome Breton race of the north, and they have the calm, thoughtful expression of those women of olden times which the old portraits have preserved for us. They, too, gathered round us, looking and listening.