THE STUDY OF NATURE. 49 
forced comparisons (which sometimes make us think of those too 
spirituel animals of Granville), do not prevent the French genius, gay, 
good, serene, and courageous, young as an April sun, from illuminating 
the entire book. It possesses numerous passages enlivened with the 
joyousness, the elasticity, the gushing song of the lark in the first 
day of spring. 
Add a thing of great beauty, which does not spring from youth. 
The author, a child of the Meuse and of a land of hunters, himself in his 
early years an ardent and impassioned sportsman, appears altered in 
character by his book. He wavers visibly between the first habits of 
slaughterous youth, and his new sentiment, his tenderness for those 
pathetic lives which he unveils—for these souls, these beings recognized 
by his soul. I dare to say that thenceforth he will no more hunt 
without remorse. Father and second creator of this world of love 
and innocence, he will find interposed between them and him a barrier 
of compassion. And what barrier? His own work, the book in 
which he gives them life. 
I had scarcely begun my book, when it became necessary for me to 
leave Nantes. I, too, was ill. The dampness of the climate, the hard 
continuous labour, and still more keenly, without doubt, the conflict 
of my thoughts, seemed to have struck home to that vital nerve of 
which nothing had ever before taken hold. The road which our 
swallows tracked for us, we followed; we proceeded southward. We 
fixed our transitory nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from 
Genoa. 
An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which, 
in the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of 
an equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense 
with fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard 
and the invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however ? 
These oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage 
with the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony. 
Animated life was very rare. There were few or no small birds; no 
sea birds. The fish, limited in numbers, did not fill with life those 
4 
