He assured his son that no Lenoble had ever been a lawyer. They
had been always lords of the soil, living on their own lands, which had
once stretched wide and far in that Norman province; a fact proved by
certain maps in M. Lenoble's possession, the paper whereof was worn and
yellow with age. They had stooped to no profession save that of arms. One
seigneur of Beaubocage had fought under Bayard himself; another had
fallen at Pavia, on that great day when all was lost _hormis l'honneur_;
another had followed the white plume of the Bernais; another--but was
there any need to tell of the glories of that house upon which Gustave
was so eager to inflict the disgrace of a learned profession?
Thus argued the father; but the mother had spent her girlhood amidst the
clamour of the Buonapartist campaigns, and the thought of war was very
terrible to her. The memory of the retreat from Russia was not yet twenty
years old. There were men alive to tell the story, to depict those days
and nights of horror, that mighty march of death. It was she and her
daughter Cydalise who had helped to persuade Gustave that he was born to
distinguish himself in the law. They wanted him to study in Paris--the
young man himself had a wild desire to enjoy the delights of that
wondrous capital--and to return in a few years to set up for himself as
_avocat_ at the town of Vevinord, some half-dozen leagues from the
patrimonial estate.
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