She had certainly been told that the old enclosure of the Fouques was now joined to the Jas-Meiffren; but she would never have thought the associations of her youth could have vanished so completely.

It seemed as though some tempest had carried off everything that her memory cherished.

The old dwelling, the large kitchen-garden, the beds of green vegetables, all had disappeared.

Not a stone, not a tree of former times remained.

And instead of the scene amidst which she had grown up, and which in her mind's eye she had seen but yesterday, there lay a strip of barren soil, a broad patch of stubbles, bare like a desert.
Henceforward, when, on closing her eyes, she might try to recall the objects of the past, that stubble would always appear to her like a shroud of yellowish drugget spread over the soil, in which her youth lay buried.