CHAPTER I. 
TERROR AND REPUGNANCE OF CHILDHOOD.* 
“WINTER, summer, and nearly all the fine days 
of the year, had passed since the departure ot 
my father for Louisiana, from which he was not 
fated to return. Our country-house had remained 
deserted. My mother, full of sad presentiments, 
and fearing herself to revisit it, sent me there, 
cather some 
5 
one afternoon, with my brothers, to 
“ And I went,—cherishing, I must own, a kind of illusion, and almost 
* This fragment of a domestic journal was originally intended for insertion in ‘* The Bird.” 
[It is from the pen of Madame Michelet. ] 
