The wanderer

He arrived at our home on a Sunday of November, 189.... I still say ‘our home,’ although the house no longer belongs to us. We left that part of the country nearly fifteen years ago and shall certainly never go back to it.We were living in the building of the Higher Elementary Classes at Sainte-Agathe’s School. My father, whom I was in the habit of calling M. Seurel as did other pupils, was head of the Middle School and also of the Higher Elementary classes where pupils worked for the preliminary teacher’s examination. Mother taught the infants.At the extreme end of the small town a long red house with five glass doors and a Virginia creeper upon its walls; an immense courtyard with shelters, a wash-house and a huge gateway, on the side looking towards the village; on the north side, a small gate opening on the road leading to the station three kilometres off; on ]the south, at the back of the house, fields, gardens, meadows joining the outskirts ... such is the simple plan of this dwelling where I spent the most troubled but the most happy days of my life—the house from which we launched our adventures and to which they returned to break themselves like waves on a bare rock.