You must know that the last house of the village--that with two glazed dormer windows upon the slanting roof, and the low door opening upon the muddy street--belonged, in 1813, to Jean-Claude Hullin, an ancient volunteer of '92; but since his return from the wars, the shoe, or, rather, sabot-maker of the village, and enjoying a large share of the esteem of the mountaineers. { 19} He was a stout, strongly built man, with gray eyes, thick lips, a short nose, and heavy, grizzled eyebrows. He was jovial and tender-hearted, and unable to refuse anything to his adopted daughter, Louise, whom he had obtained, when an infant, from a band of those miserable gypsies who, without hearth or home themselves, wander from door to door, soldering spoons and pans, and mending broken china. He, however, looked upon her as his own daughter, and never remembered her as the child of a strange race.
Besides this, his affection for his little girl, stout Jean-Claude had a few others. Next in order, he loved his cousin, the venerable mistress of Bois-de-Chênes, Catherine Lefevre, and her son, Gaspard, a fine young fellow, betrothed to Louise, but whom the conscription had carried off, leaving the two families to await the end of the campaign and his return.
Hullin often recalled, and always with enthusiasm, his campaigns of the Sambre-and-Meuse, of Italy and of Egypt. He often mused upon them, and sometimes at evening, when his day's work was done, he would wander to the saw-mill of Valtin, a gloomy building, formed of logs covered with the bark, which you see yonder at the bottom of the gorge. There he would sit, in the midst of coal-burners and wood-cutters, before the huge fire made of saw-dust, and while the heavy wheel kept turning, the sluice thundering, and the saw cutting, would he discourse of Hoche, of Kleber, and of General Bonaparte, whom he had seen a hundred times, and whose thin face, piercing eyes, and aquiline nose he drew over and over again.
Such was Jean-Claude Hullin, one of the old Gallic stock, loving strange adventures and deeds of heroic emprise, but bound by the feeling of duty to his toil from New-Year's day to Saint Sylvester's.
Louise, his gypsy daughter, was slight and graceful, with long, delicate hands, and eyes of so tender a blue that their glance seemed to melt their way to the depths of your soul; her skin was white as snow, her hair a gold-shot flaxen, soft as silk, and her shoulders drooped like those of some sweet sculptured saint at prayer. Her guileless smile, her musing brow, her whole form, seemed to recall the antique lay of Erhart the Minnesinger, wherein he says: "I saw a ray of light flash by, and mine eyes are yet dazed with its lustre. Was it the moon glancing through the leaves? Was it morning smiling beneath the woods? No, no! It was Edith, my love, who passed; and still mine eyes are dazed."