And as his client left, the man would pass on his reflections to the cashier: “Poor Monsieur Parent is in a bad way; staying in Paris all the time is doing him no good. Get him to go out into the country and have a fish dinner from time to time; he thinks a lot of your opinion. Summer’s coming soon; it’ll put some life into him.”
And the cashier, full of pity and kindly feeling for the obstinate customer, would every day repeat to Parent: “Now, Monsieur, make up your mind to get into the open air. It’s so lovely in the country when the weather’s fine! If I only could, I’d spend all my life there, I would.”
And she would tell him her dreams, the simple and poetical dreams of all the poor girls who are shut up from one year’s end to another behind the windows of a shop, and watch the glittering noisy stream of life go by in the street outside, and dream of the calm, sweet life of the fields, of life under the trees, under the radiant sun falling upon the meadows, the deep woods, the clear rivers, the cows lying in the grass, and all the various flowers, all the wild, free blossoms, blue, red, yellow, violet, lilac, pink, and white, so charming, so fresh, so sweet-scented, all the flowers of nature waiting there to be picked by the passerby and heaped into huge bunches.
She found pleasure in talking to him always of her perpetual longing, unrealised and unrealisable; and he, poor hopeless wretch, found pleasure in listening to her. He came and sat now beside the counter, so as to talk to Mademoiselle Zoé and discuss the country with her. Little by little a vague desire came over him to go and see, just once, whether it really was as nice as she said it was, outside the walls of the great city.
One morning he asked her:
“Do you know any place in the suburbs where one can get a good lunch?”
“Yes,” she replied; “go to La Terrasse at Saint-Germain. It’s so pretty.”
He had been there long ago, when he was engaged to Henriette. He decided to go again.
He chose a Sunday, for no particular reason, but merely because the usual thing is to go off for the day on a Sunday, even when the whole week is unoccupied.
So one Sunday morning he went off to Saint-Germain.
It was early in July, a hot, sunny day. Sitting in the corner of the railway carriage, he watched the passing of the trees and the strange little houses on the outskirts of Paris. He felt sad, annoyed with himself for having yielded to this new desire and broken his habits. The landscape, changing, yet always the same, wearied him. He was thirsty; he would gladly have got off at every station in order to sit down in the café that he saw outside, drink a bock or two, and take the next train back to Paris. And the journey seemed to him to be long, very long. He used to spend whole days sitting still with the same motionless objects before his eyes, but he found it enervating and wearisome to remain seated while moving about, to watch the country moving while he himself did not stir.
He took some interest in the Seine, nevertheless, whenever they crossed it. Under the bridge at Chatou he saw skiffs darting along at the powerful strokes of bare-armed oarsmen, and thought: “Those chaps must be having a good time.”
The long ribbon of river that unrolls from both sides of the bridge of Pecq aroused a vague desire in the depths of his heart to walk along the banks. But the train plunged into the tunnel which precedes Saint-Germain station and soon stopped at the arrival platform.
Parent got out and, weighed down by fatigue, went off in the direction of La Terrasse, his hands behind his back. Having reached the iron railing, he stopped to look at the view. The vast plain was spread out before him, boundless as the sea, a green expanse dotted with large villages as populous as towns. White roads ran across this wide country, patches of forest wooded it in various places, the pools of the Vésinet gleamed like silver medals, and the distant slopes of Sannois and Argenteuil hovered behind the light bluish mist like shadows of themselves. The warm, abundant light of the sun was bathing the whole broad landscape, faintly veiled by the morning mist, by the sweat of the heated earth exhaled in thin fog, and by the damp vapours of the Seine, gliding endlessly like a serpent across the plains, encircling the villages, and skirting the hills.
A soft breeze, laden with the odour of leaves and sap, caressed the skin, penetrated deep into the lungs, and seemed to rejuvenate the heart, ease the mind, and invigorate the blood.
Parent, surprised, drank deeply of it, his eyes dazzled by the vast sweep of the landscape.
“Yes, it’s very nice here,” he murmured.
He walked forward a few steps, and stopped again to stare. He fancied he was discovering new and unknown things, not the things which his eyes saw, but those of which his soul foretold him, events of which he was unaware, glimpses of happiness, unexplored pleasures, a whole view of life whose existence he had not suspected, suddenly revealed to him as he gazed at this stretch of boundless plains.
All the appalling melancholy of his existence appeared to him, brilliantly illumined by the radiance flooding the earth. He saw the twenty years of café life, drab, monotonous, heartbreaking. He might have
