Les Misérables - Volume II - Cosette

Classic from the year 2009 in the subject French Studies - Literature language: English abstract: BOOK FIRST. WATERLOO***CHAPTER I. WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES***Last year (1861) on a beautiful May morning a traveller the person who is telling this story was coming from Nivelles and directing his course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved road which undulated between two rows of trees over the hills which succeed each other raise the road and let it fall again and produce something in the nature of enormous waves.He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l'Alleud which has the form of a reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and at the angle of the cross-road by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet bearing the inscription Ancient Barrier No. 4 a public house bearing on its front this sign: At the Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents). Echabeau Private Cafe.A quarter of a league further on he arrived at the bottom of a little valley where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very green trees which fills the valley on one side of the road is dispersed over the meadows on the other and disappears gracefully and as in order in the direction of Braine-l'Alleud.On the right close to the road was an inn with a four-wheeled cart at the door a large bundle of hop-poles a plough a heap of dried brushwood near a flourishing hedge lime smoking in a square hole and a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A young girl was weeding in a field where a huge yellow poster probably of some outside spectacle such as a parish festival was fluttering in the wind. At one corner of the inn beside a pool in which a flotilla of ducks was navigating a badly paved path plunged into the bushes. The wayfarer struck into this.