ariegated colors, the
warm yellows of the silex, the white of the lime carbonates, the russet
browns of the sandstone, in many a fantastic shape. As you first enter
it, the park is gloomy, the walls are hidden by creeping plants and by
trees that for fifty years have heard no sound of axe. One might think
it a virgin forest, made primeval again through some phenomenon granted
exclusively to forests. The trunks of the trees are swathed with lichen
which hangs from one to another. Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves,
droops from every fork of the branches where moisture settles. I have
found gigantic ivies, wild arabesques which flourish only at fifty
leagues from Paris, here where land does not cost enough to make one
sparing of it. The landscape on such free lines covers a great deal of
ground. Nothing is smoothed off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches
are full of water, frogs are tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the
woodland flowers bloom, and the heather is as beautiful as that I have
seen on your mantle-shelf in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by
Florine. This mystery is intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The
forest odors, beloved of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight
in the tiny mosses, the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the
balsams, the wild thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star
of the yellow water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations
came to my nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their
soul? I seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding
alley.

The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars and
all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family with graceful
branches and elegant bearing, the trees of a love as free! It was from
this point, my dear fellow, that I saw a pond covered with the white
water-lily and other plants with broad flat leaves and narrow slender
ones, on which lay a boat painted white and black, as light as a
nut-shell and dainty as the wherry of a Seine boatman. Beyond rose
the chateau, built in 1560, of fine red brick, with stone courses and
copings, and window-frames in which the sashes were of small leaded
panes (O Versailles!). The stone is hewn in diamond points, but
hollowed, as in the Ducal Palace at Venice on the facade toward the
Bridge of Sighs. There are no regular lines about the castle except in
the centre building, from which projects a stately porti