s--burlesque forests, filled
with corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons in the
underbrush.

The heat on this day was stifling; the sun was swimming in clouds,
shedding a veiled diffuse light that was almost blinding to the eyes and
that seemed to portend a storm. The air was heavy and dead; nothing
stirred; the leaves and their tiny, meagre shadows did not move; the
forest seemed weary and crushed, as it were, beneath the heavy sky. At
rare intervals a breath of air from the south passed lazily along,
sweeping the ground, one of those enervating, lifeless winds that blow
upon the senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With no
knowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her whole body a sensation
like the tickling of the down on a ripe peach against the skin.

They went gayly along, with the somewhat excited activity that the
country air imparts to the common people. The men ran, the women tripped
after them and caught them. They played at rolling on the grass. There
was a manifest longing to dance and climb trees; the painter amused
himself by throwing stones at the loop-holes in the gateways of the
fortress, and he never missed his aim.

At last they all sat down in a sort of clearing under a clump of oaks,
whose shadows were lengthening in the setting sun. The men, lighting
matches on the seats of their trousers, began to smoke. The women
chattered and laughed and threw themselves backward in paroxysms of
inane hilarity and noisy outbursts of delight. Germinie alone did not
speak or laugh. She did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath their
lowered lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed in
thought was she that you would have said she was totally oblivious to
time and place. Lying at full length on the grass, her head slightly
raised by a hammock, she made no other movement than to lay her hands,
palm downwards, on the grass beside her; in a short time she would turn
them on their backs and let them lie in that position, seeking the
coolness of the earth to allay the fever of her flesh.

"There's a lazybones! going to sleep?" said Adele.

Germinie opened wide her blazing eyes, without answering, and until
dinner maintained the same position, the same silence, the same air of
torpor, feeling about her for places where her burning hands had not
rested.

"Come, old girl!" said a woman's voice, "sing us something."

"Oh! no," Adele replied, "I haven't got wind enough bef