CHAPTER III.
A few hours' ride from Paris in a southwesterly direction, and we are at Ruillé-sur-Loir, a village that shared in all the vicissitudes which the great revolution produced in the surrounding country.
Looking back a century it is no longer la belle France that we see. The vine-covered hills are laid waste, comfortable hearths are forsaken and left in ruins, and the despondent winds sing funeral dirges, nature mourning like Rachel for the loss of her children and will not be comforted because they are not. Gayety and splendor are exchanged for widow's weeds, and the despair of spent passion mingling with the echoed cry of the guillotined king is the threnody of the once happy and exultant heart.
The rising generation receives its legacy of misery with hardened indifference. The soft light of faith and trust and love which used to beam from the eye of the people gives place to furtive glances and lurid flashes of hatred and revenge. They have strayed from their God; what have they left to them? And Ephraim is my first-born! fair France the first-born
43
