"Tell me, godfather, what is that? . . . Did someone find that face in the earth? . . ."
Little Pierre is vaguely disturbed by this thing, the like of which he had never seen; as if it was for him the first revelation of an order of sinister objects dwelling under the earth. . . .
The weather, for this day of pardon, was a little dull, but delightful nevertheless.
For ten hours, the bagpipes played in front of the chapel, under the great oaks, and gavottes were danced on the mossy turf.
That indescribable quality of Breton summers, which is somehow melancholy, is, if one may so express it, a compound of many things: the charm of the long, warm days, rarer here than elsewhere and sooner over; the tall-growing herbage fresh and green, with the extreme profusion of red flowers; and then the sentiment of olden times, which seems to slumber here, to permeate everything.
Old land of Toulven, great woods where the black fir trees, trees of the north, mingle already with the oaks and beeches; Breton countrysides, which seem to be wrapt still in the past. . . .
Great rocks covered with grey lichen, as fine as an old man's beard; plains in which the granite crops out of the ancient soil, plains of purple heather. . . .
They are impressions of tranquillity, of appeasement, which this country brings me; and also an aspiration towards a more complete repose under the mossy turf, at the foot of the chapels which are in the woods. And, with Yves, all this is vaguer, more inexpressible, but more intense also, as with me when I was a child.
To see us sitting together in the woods in the calm of these fine summer days, one would never imagine what our youth had been, what life we had lived, nor what terrible scenes there had been between us formerly, when first our two natures, very different and very alike, had come in conflict one with the other.
Every evening before we go to bed, we play with little Pierre a Toulven game, amusing enough, which consists in holding one another by the chin and reciting, without laughing, a long rigmarole: "By the beard of Minette I hold you. The first of us two who shall laugh . . . etc." At this game little Pierre is always caught.
After that come the gymnastics. Yves goes through the performance with his son, turning him over, making him "go about," head down, legs in the air, at arm's length, then raising him very high. "Tell me, little Pierre, when will you have arms like mine? Tell me! Oh, never; never arms like yours, father; I shall not suffer hardship enough for that, I am sure."