The place had a wild air. These wooded hills, these carpets of lichen, resembled a landscape of olden times, though bearing the mark of no precise epoch. But Anne's costume was clearly of the Middle Ages and the impression that one had was of that period.
Not the gloomy and twilight Middle Ages as understood by Gustave Doré, but the Middle Ages sunlit and full of flowers, of these same eternal flowers of the fields of Gaul, which bloomed as now for our ancestors.
It was eleven o'clock when we returned to the cottage of the old Keremenens for dinner. It was very warm that summer in Brittany; the ferns and the little red flowers of the roadside bowed down under the unaccustomed sun, which exhausted them, tempered though it was by the green branches.
One o'clock. For me, the hour of departure. I went first of all to kiss little Pierre, asleep still in his old oaken cradle, as if these four days had not sufficed him for recovering from the fatigue he had suffered in coming into the world.
I bade good-bye to all. Yves, thoughtful, leaning against the door, was waiting to accompany me as far as Toulven, whence the diligence would take me to the station at Bannalec. Anne and old Corentin also insisted on escorting me.
And, when I saw Toulven disappearing in the distance, its grey steeple and its mournful pond, my heart contracted. How many years would it be before I should return to Brittany? Once more we were separating, my brother and I, and both of us were going away into the unknown. I was uneasy about his future, over which I saw dark clouds gathering. . . . And I thought also of these Keremenens whose welcome had touched me. I asked myself whether my poor Yves, with his terrible failings and his uncontrollable character, was not going to bring unhappiness upon them, under their roof of thatch covered with little red flowers.
[CHAPTER LI]
November, 1880.
A little more than two years later.
Little Pierre was cold. He cried as he clasped his two little hands, which he tried to hide under his pinafore. He was in a street in Brest, before daybreak, on a November morning. A fine rain was falling. He pressed close to his mother who, also, was weeping.