42 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 
T resume. 
See me now torn from the city by this loving inquietude, by 
my fears for an invalid whom it was essential to restore to the 
conditions of her early life and the free air of the country. I 
quitted Paris, my city, which I had never left before; that city 
which comprises the three worlds; that cradle of Art and Thought. 
I returned there daily for my duties and occupations; but I 
hastened to get quit of it. Its noise, its distant hum, the ebb and 
flow of abortive revolutions, impelled me to wander afar. It was 
with much pleasure that, in the spring of 1852, I broke through all 
the ties of old habits; I closed my library with a bitter joy, I put 
under lock and key my books, the companions of my life, which 
had assuredly thought to hold me bound for ever. I travelled so 
long as earth supported me, and only halted at Nantes, close to the 
sea, on a hill which overlooks the yellow streams of Brittany as they 
flow onward to mingle, in the Loire, with the gray waters of La Vendée. 
We established ourselves in a large country mansion, completely 
isolated, in the midst of the constant rains with which our western 
fields are inundated at this season. At such a distance from the 
ocean, one does not feel its briny influence; the rains are tempests 
of fresh water. The house, in the Louis Quinze style, had been 
uninhabited for a considerable period, and at first sight seemed a 
little gloomy. Situated on elevated ground, it was rendered not the 
less sombre by thick hedges on the one side, on the other by tall 
trees and by an untold number of unpruned cherry-trees. The 
whole, on a greensward, which the undrained waters preserved, 
even in summer, in a beautifully fresh condition. 
I adore neglected gardens, and this one reminded me of the 
great abandoned vineyards of the Italian villas; but it possessed, 
what these villas lack, a charming medley of vegetables and 
plants of a thousand different species—all the herbs of the St. John, 
and each herb tall and vigorous. The forest of cherry-trees, bending 
under their burden of scarlet fruit, gave also the idea of inex- 
haustible abundance. 
