CHAPTER I. 
TERROR AND REPUGNANCE OF CHILDHOOD * 
“ Winter, summer, and nearly all the fine days 
of the year, had passed since the departure of 
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, 
one afternoon, with my brothers, to gather some 
fruit. 
« 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 
[It is from the pen of Madame Michelet.] 
“The Bird.” 
4 B 
