road, a clear laugh rose from the rain-torn eglantines; then hearts
beat when, in the bright dog-days, the black barns softened the
clucking of the hens under the scarlet sky of the south.

...This guitar or another I heard in the courtyard of my Huguenot
great-aunts, one summer's evening when I was four years old. The
courtyard slept in the white twilight, the roofs shed an unimaginable
tenderness upon the climbing rosebushes and the bright paving-stones.
Some one sitting on a beam was making merry at the expense of my
childhood and my white apron. My great uncle sang some melody from the
capital. I can see him again, standing upright with his head thrown
back. The air trembled softly. At the end of a roulade he made an
exaggerated and charming bow.

I bless you, oh humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter
my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other
distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and
watching the faces of the poor. But I reach the hillside where the
prickly furze is spread, and in musing upon my difficulties I am
filled with a beneficent gentleness. To-day it is no longer the
coarse and disdainful laugh of the public, nor the terrible doubt of
everything, which disturbs me. The laugh of my detractors has grown
wearied, and I have become indifferent to what I am. Yet I have become
grave toward myself and others. It is with an apprehensive joy that I
regard the heedlessness of the happy. I have learned what misery
may spring from love, what blindness is born of a glance. And it is
because of what I have suffered that I would bestow a sad and slow
caress on those who have not yet known anything but happiness.

* * * * *

The open door, the blue sky, the watering of the grass and the
gilliflowers, and the hyacinths, and a single bird which chirps, and
my dogs stretched on the ground and the rosebushes with their thick
stems, the verdure of the lilacs, and a clock that is striking, a wasp
which flies straight and marks the meadow with the lines of its golden
vibration, and stops, hesitates, sets off again, is silent and buzzes....

Hearts and choirs of primroses in the moist, shadowy mosses of the
woods; long threads of rose and blue dew floating and swinging and
suspended--from what?--in the immaterial morning; tree-frogs with
golden eye-lids and white throbbing throats; furze whose perfume of
faded peach and rose follo