I was setting to work on the 6th volume of St Augustine—I had just awoken. It was after three. My mother brought me Mme. de Maupassant’s letter—we left—heat terrible in Rouen—I had the carriage ready very quickly, I got the shaft on while Eugène went for the horses. At the port, across from the Guillaume-Lion gate, a man on horseback in summer pants and black tails passed by and I took him for Alphonse Karr. At the top of the rise we went into a tavern, my mother and I, Au jeune Ermite, where I had a grog with kirsch; Eugène a glass of cider—(We’d been there to see the church, in a hackney-coach with Max, the winter before my Father, Caroline and had a few little glasses.) We said almost nothing the whole trip—the left horse was galloping, I watched its head—
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