After her new friend had left, Perrine would like to have still sat at the table as though she were in her own place, but it was precisely because she was not in the place where she belonged that she felt she could not. She had learned that the little garden was reserved for the boarders and that the factory hands were not privileged to sit there. She could not see any seats near the old tumble-down house where she was to lodge, so she left the table and sauntered down the village street.
Although she went at a slow step, she had soon walked down all the streets, and as everyone stared at her, being a stranger, this had prevented her from stopping when she had wanted to.
On the top of the hill opposite the factories she had noticed a wood. Perhaps she would be alone there and could sit down without anyone paying attention to her.
She climbed the hill, then stretched herself out on the grass and looked down over the village ... her father's birthplace, which he had described so often to her mother and herself.
She had arrived at Maraucourt! This name, which she had repeated so often since she had trod on French soil, the name she had seen on the big vans standing outside the Gates of Paris. This was not a country of dreams. She was in Maraucourt; before her she could see the vast works which belonged to her grandfather. He had made his fortune here, bit by bit, sou by sou, until now he was worth millions.
Her eyes wandered from the great chimneys to the railway tracks, where all was quiet on this Sabbath day, to the winding streets and the quaint houses with their tiled or thatched roofs. Amongst the very old houses there was one which seemed more pretentious than the others. It stood in a large garden in which there were great trees and a terrace, and at the remote corner of the garden a wash-house.
That house had been described to her so many times, she recognized it. It was the one in which her grandfather had lived before he had built the beautiful chateau. How many hours her father, when a boy, had spent in that wash-house on washing days, listening to the washerwomen's chatter and to the stories they told, quaint old legends. He had remembered them all those years, and later on had told them to his little daughter. There was the "Fairy of the Cascade", "The Whirling Dwarf", and lots of others. She remembered them all, and her dead father had listened to the old women telling them at that very spot down there by the river.