, bend forward, you drink that cold and
pellucid water which wets your moustache and nose, you drink it with a
physical pleasure, as though you kissed the spring, lip to lip.
Sometimes, when you encounter a deep hole, along the course of these
tiny brooks, you plunge into it, quite naked, and you feel on your skin,
from head to foot, like an icy and delicious caress, the lovely and
gentle quivering of the current.

You are gay on the hills, melancholy on the verge of pools, exalted when
the sun is crowned in an ocean of blood-red shadows, and when it casts
on the rivers its red reflection. And, at night, under the moon, which
passes across the vault of heaven, you think of things, and singular
things, which would never have occurred to your mind under the brilliant
light of day.

So, in wandering through the same country where we are this year, I came
to the little village of Benouville, on the Falaise, between Yport and
Etretat. I came from Fecamp, following the coast, a high coast, and as
perpendicular as a wall, with its projecting and rugged rocks falling
perpendicularly into the sea. I had walked since the morning on the
shaven grass, as smooth and as yielding as a carpet. And singing
lustily, I walked with long strides, looking sometimes at the slow and
ambling flight of a gull, with its short, white wings, sailing in the
blue heavens, sometimes on the green sea, at the brown sails of a
fishing bark. In short, I had passed a happy day, a day of listlessness
and of liberty.

I was shown a little farm house, where travelers were put up, a kind of
inn, kept by a peasant, which stood in the center of a Norman court,
which was surrounded by a double row of beeches.

Quitting the Falaise, I gained the hamlet, which was hemmed in by great
trees, and I presented myself at the house of Mother Lecacheur.

She was an old, wrinkled and austere rustic, who seemed always to
succumb to the pressure of new customs with a kind of contempt.

It was the month of May: the spreading apple-trees covered the court
with a whirling shower of blossoms which rained unceasingly both upon
people and upon the grass.

I said:

"Well, Madame Lecacheur, have you a room for me?"

Astonished to find that I knew her name, she answered:

"That depends; everything is let; but, all the same, there will be no
harm in looking."

In five minutes we were in perfect accord, and I deposited my bag upon
the bare floor of a rustic room, furnished