that it is possible to imagine. I have travelled a good deal, and seen
much grander things, but none more charming than this little village
gaily seated at the foot of the hill which protects it.

Mme. Arnould asked us if we would take a boat, and Marguerite and
Prudence accepted joyously.

People have always associated the country with love, and they have done
well; nothing affords so fine a frame for the woman whom one loves as
the blue sky, the odours, the flowers, the breeze, the shining solitude
of fields, or woods. However much one loves a woman, whatever confidence
one may have in her, whatever certainty her past may offer us as to her
future, one is always more or less jealous. If you have been in love,
you must have felt the need of isolating from this world the being in
whom you would live wholly. It seems as if, however indifferent she may
be to her surroundings, the woman whom one loves loses something of her
perfume and of her unity at the contact of men and things. As for me, I
experienced that more than most. Mine was not an ordinary love; I was
as much in love as an ordinary creature could be, but with Marguerite
Gautier; that is to say, that at Paris, at every step, I might elbow
the man who had already been her lover or who was about to, while in
the country, surrounded by people whom we had never seen and who had no
concern with us, alone with nature in the spring-time of the year, that
annual pardon, and shut off from the noise of the city, I could hide my
love, and love without shame or fear.

The courtesan disappeared little by little. I had by me a young and
beautiful woman, whom I loved, and who loved me, and who was called
Marguerite; the past had no more reality and the future no more clouds.
The sun shone upon my mistress as it might have shone upon the purest
bride. We walked together in those charming spots which seemed to have
been made on purpose to recall the verses of Lamartine or to sing the
melodies of Scudo. Marguerite was dressed in white, she leaned on my
arm, saying over to me again under the starry sky the words she had said
to me the day before, and far off the world went on its way, without
darkening with its shadow the radiant picture of our youth and love.

That was the dream that the hot sun brought to me that day through the
leaves of the trees, as, lying on the grass of the island on which we
had landed, I let my thought wander, free from the human links that had
bound