hour when our mind, a greater stranger to the flesh..."

Near him, Choulette, seated on the balustrade of the terrace, his legs
hanging, and his nose in his beard, was still at work on the figure of
Misery on his stick.

Dechartre resumed the rhymes of the canticle: "At the hour when our
mind, a greater stranger to the flesh; and less under the obsession of
thoughts, is almost divine in its visions,..."

She approached beside the boxwood hedge, holding a parasol and dressed
in a straw-colored gown. The faint sunlight of winter enveloped her in
pale gold.

Dechartre greeted her joyfully.

She said:

"You are reciting verses that I do not know. I know only Metastasio. My
teacher liked only Metastasio. What is the hour when the mind has divine
visions?"

"Madame, that hour is the dawn of the day. It may be also the dawn of
faith and of love."

Choulette doubted that the poet meant dreams of the morning, which leave
at awakening vivid and painful impressions, and which are not altogether
strangers to the flesh. But Dechartre had quoted these verses in the
pleasure of the glorious dawn which he had seen that morning on the
golden hills. He had been, for a long time, troubled about the images
that one sees in sleep, and he believed that these images were not
related to the object that preoccupies one the most, but, on the
contrary, to ideas abandoned during the day.

Therese recalled her morning dream, the hunter lost in the thicket.

"Yes," said Dechartre, "the things we see at night are unfortunate
remains of what we have neglected the day before. Dreams avenge things
one has disdained. They are reproaches of abandoned friends. Hence their
sadness."

She was lost in dreams for a moment, then she said:

"That is perhaps true."

Then, quickly, she asked Choulette if he had finished the portrait
of Misery on his stick. Misery had now become a figure of Piety, and
Choulette recognized the Virgin in it. He had even composed a quatrain
which he was to write on it in spiral form--a didactic and moral
quatrain. He would cease to write, except in the style of the
commandments of God rendered into French verses. The four lines
expressed simplicity and goodness. He consented to recite them.

Therese rested on the balustrade of the terrace and sought in the
distance, in the depth of the sea of light, the peaks of Vallambrosa,
almost as blue as the sky. Jacques Dechartre looked at her. It seemed
to him that he saw he