Edgar Quinet - 1881 Author:Richard Heath Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. CERTINES, CHAROLLES. l8o7-l8ll. " She Is In love with the Immortal part of me."—Pliny's letters. At the commencement of 1807 the boy and his m... more »other returned to France, and went at once to Certines, a country place about six or seven miles from Bourg, his father possessing a small estate there, which had been in the family three hundred years. Certines was one of those out-of-the-world spots, rarer and rarer every day, but which in the early part of this century were not uncommon even in England. The sun set behind vast oak forests, so illimitable that people got lost in them for days; it rose over a ridge of mountains, the first step in the mighty ranges of the Jura and of the Alps. Between the forests and the mountains lay heaths, copses, alder woods, vast plains of grass or of corn; over this immense ocean of broom, of heath, of rye, the sultry summer air hung silent and peaceful, while in the autumn, from the marshes and the dark pools in the forest arose miasmas, bringing fever into every cottage and homestead. On a little hill in this vast waving ocean stood the ancestral home of the Quinets, half cottage, half chateau, in the midst of acacias and poplars, and of pear, nut, and cherry trees, the latter pushing their long branches right into its windows. The building was very old, and Jerome Quinet had ornamented it with two semi-circular summer houses, with slate roofs and columns. A NATURAL EDUCATION. 9 Here his family lived a rural life, and the little Edgar received a natural and, for that very reason, a singular education. In the early summer time the boy rose with the dawn, shouldered his little hay-fork, and went to the meadows with the mowers. In harvest time he gleaned after the reapers, made a sheaf, beat out the corn with a little flail, ...« less