it had passed had been hard, but soon it would be
fully restored by the slightly acid sweetness of the myrtles. Even now
it was quivering as it listened to its scattered companions.

On entering this Paradise to dwell therein the sheep of Francis saw
the lamb of Jean de la Fontaine amid the forget-me-nots which were
of the mirror-like color of the waves. It no longer disputed with
the wolf of the fable. It drank, and the water did not become turbid
thereat. The untamed spring over which the two hundred year old ivy
seemed to have thrown a shadow of bitterness, streamed on amid
the grass with its broken waves in which were mirrored the snowy
tremblings of the lamb.

And high on the slopes of the _happy valleys_ they saw the sheep of
those heroes that Cervantes tells about, all of whom were sick at
heart for the love of one and the same girl and left their city to
lead the life of shepherds in a far-away country. These sheep had
the gentlest of voices, like hearts that secretly love their own
sufferings. They drank from the wild thyme the always new, burning
tears which their bucolic poets had let fall like dew from the cups of
their eyes.

At the horizon of this Paradise there rose a confused murmur like
that of the Ocean. It consisted of the broken sobbing of flutes
or clarinets, of cries reechoed from the abysses, of the baying of
restless dogs, and of the fall of a moss-covered stone into the
void. It was the tumult of the waterfalls high above the noise of the
torrents. It was like the voice of a people on the march toward the
promised land, toward the grapes without name, toward the fiery spikes
of grain; and mingled with this sound was the braying of pregnant
she-asses, that were laden with heavy containers of milk and the
mantles of the herdsmen and salt and cheeses which were brittle like
chalk.

* * * * *

The fourth Paradise in its almost indescribable barrenness was that of
the wolves.

At the summit of a treeless mountain, in the desolation of the wind,
beneath a penetrating fog, they felt the voluptuous joy of martyrdom.
They sustained themselves with their hunger. They experienced a bitter
joy in feeling that they were abandoned, that never for more than an
instant--and then only under the greatest suffering--had they been
able to renounce their lust for blood. They were the disinherited,
possessed of the dream that could never be realized. For a long time
they had no