Sante Bourguignon,"_

replied the postman with a laugh. "I come from the Avallon country. I
have family papers going back to 1200 and something...."

Olivier was intrigued, and tried to find out more about him. Hurteloup
asked nothing better than to be allowed to talk. He belonged, in fact,
to one of the oldest families in Burgundy. One of his ancestors had been
on crusade with Philippe Auguste: another had been secretary of State
under Henri II. The family had begun to decay in the seventeenth
century. At the time of the Revolution, ruined and despairing, they had
taken the plunge into the ocean of the people. Now they were coming to
the surface again as the result of honest work and the physical and
moral vigor of Hurteloup the postman, and his fidelity to his race. His
greatest hobby had been collecting historical and genealogical documents
relating to his family and their native country. In off hours he used to
go to the Archives and copy out old papers. Whenever he did not
understand them he would go and ask one of the people on his beat, a
Chartist or a student at the Sorbonne, to explain. His illustrious
ancestry did not turn his head: he would speak of it laughingly, with
never a shade of embarrassment or of indignation at the hardness of
fate. His careless sturdy gaiety was a delightful thing to see. And when
Olivier looked at him he thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the
life of human families, which for centuries flows burningly, for
centuries disappears under the ground, and then comes bubbling forth
again, having gathered fresh energy from the depths of the earth. And
the people seemed to him to be an immense reservoir into which the
rivers of the past plunge, while the rivers of the future spring forth
again, and, though they bear a new name, are sometimes the same as those
of old.