co with double
flights of curving steps, and round balusters slender at their base
and broadening at the middle. The main building is surrounded by
clock-towers and sundry modern turrets, with galleries and vases more
or less Greek. No harmony there, my dear Nathan! These heterogeneous
erections are wrapped, so to speak, by various evergreen trees whose
branches shed their brown needles upon the roofs, nourishing the lichen
and giving tone to the cracks and crevices where the eye delights to
wander. Here you see the Italian pine, the stone pine, with its red bark
and its majestic parasol; here a cedar two hundred years old, weeping
willows, a Norway spruce, and a beech which overtops them all; and
there, in front of the main tower, some very singular shrubs,--a yew
trimmed in a way that recalls some long-decayed garden of old France,
and magnolias with hortensias at their feet. In short, the place is
the Invalides of the heroes of horticulture, once the fashion and now
forgotten, like all other heroes.

A chimney, with curious copings, which was sending forth great volumes
of smoke, assured me that this delightful scene was not an opera
setting. A kitchen reveals human beings. Now imagine _me_, Blondet, who
shiver as if in the polar regions at Saint-Cloud, in the midst of this
glowing Burgundian climate. The sun sends down its warmest rays, the
king-fisher watches on the shores of the pond, the cricket chirps, the
grain-pods burst, the poppy drops its morphia in glutinous tears, and
all are clearly defined on the dark-blue ether. Above the ruddy soil
of the terraces flames that joyous natural punch which intoxicates the
insects and the flowers and dazzles our eyes and browns our faces. The
grape is beading, its tendrils fall in a veil of threads whose
delicacy puts to shame the lace-makers. Beside the house blue larkspur,
nasturtium, and sweet-peas are blooming. From a distance orange-trees
and tuberoses scent the air. After the poetic exhalations of the woods
(a gradual preparation) came the delectable pastilles of this botanic
seraglio.

Standing on the portico, like the queen of flowers, behold a woman robed
in white, with hair unpowdered, holding a parasol lined with white silk,
but herself whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies at her feet,
whiter than the starry jasmine that climbed the balustrade,--a woman, a
Frenchwoman born in Russia, who said as I approached her, "I had almost
given you up." She had se