Here is the walk edged with stone benches on which old men and
old women sit coughing and gossiping; here mothers bring their work,
while their children run about; and in the centre, at the junction of
the paths, is the platform where the regimental band plays on Sundays.

The Neufchatel gardens are in no way elaborate: a number of avenues have
been cut out of an ancient wood; and that is all. There are no shrubs;
just a patch of dahlias, with a ridiculous little iron railing round
them. But its whole charm lies in its picturesque situation up above the
town. In between the tall trees with their interlacing boughs, one can
see the slopes of the hills, the plains, the meadows, the gleaming roofs
and the church with its twin spires piercing the blue of the sky. Then,
in the foreground, I see, behind the houses, the little gardens whose
breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of
equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but
sometimes also a patchwork adorned with grottoes, arbours and glass
bells.

Rose mentioned a garden which brightens her little home. Suppose it were
one of these!... A woman appears over there: she is tall and
fair-haired. She stoops over a well; I cannot make out her features. She
draws herself up again. Oh, no, her figure is clumsy, her hair looks
dull and colourless and her clothes vulgar. Rose would never dress like
that, in two colours that clash! Rose would never ...

I wander into a delicious reverie. How infinitely superior Rose is to
all these people whose lives I can picture around me. Two women sit
cackling beside me on the bench: they are at once guileless and bad,
with their mania for eternally wagging tongues that know no rest. A
little farther on, a good housewife is shaking her troublesome child; a
stout, overdressed woman of the shop-keeping class is flaunting her
finery down one of the walks; a priest passes and, while his lips mumble
prayers, his eyes, held in leash by fear, prowl around me; one of his
flock curtseys to the ground as she meets him.

A protest rises in my heart at each of the little incidents: is not Rose
rid of all that? Rose long ago gave up going to mass and confession. She
has lost the hypocritical sense of shame, knows neither envy nor malice
and is a stranger to all ostentation.

I often used to reproach her with her extreme humility. How wrong I was!
I now think that this humility can achieve the same