“I have given you more than I ought,” she said in conclusion, “since there is nothing more that you can take, and I am already punished.”
I could but soothe her, promise never, never to cause her a moment’s pain, and vow to love her at twenty as old men love their youngest born.
Next morning I came early to the house. She had no flowers to put in the vases in her gray drawing-room. I tramped across the fields and through the vineyards, hunting for flowers to make her two nosegays; and as I gathered them one by one, cutting them with long stems and admiring them, it struck me that there was a harmony in their hues and foliage, a poetry that found its way to the understanding by fascinating the eye, just as musical phrases arouse a thousand associations in loved and loving hearts. If color is organic light, must it not have its meaning, as vibrations of the air have? Helped by Jacques and Madeleine, all three of us happy in contriving a surprise for our dear one, I sat down on the lower steps of the terrace flight, where we spread out our flowers, and set to work to compose two nosegays, by which I intended to symbolize a sentiment.
Picture to yourself a fountain of flowers, gushing up, as it were, from the vase and falling in fringed waves, and from the heart of it my aspirations rose as silver-cupped lilies and white roses. Among this cool mass twinkled blue cornflowers, forget-me-not, bugloss—every blue flower whose hues, borrowed from the sky, blend so well with white; for are they not two types of innocence—that which knows nothing, and that which knows all—the mind of a child and the mind of a martyr? Love has its blazonry, and the Countess read my meaning. She gave me one of those piercing looks that are like the cry of a wounded man touched on the tender spot; she was at once shy and delighted. What a reward I found in that look! What encouragement in the thought that I could please her and refresh her heart!
So I invented Father Castel’s theory as applied to love, and rediscovered for her a lore lost to Europe where flowers of language take the place of the messages conveyed in the East by color and fragrance. And it was charming to express my meaning through these daughters of the sun, the sisters of the blossoms that open under the radiance of love. I soon had an understanding with the products of the rural flora, just as a man I met at a later time had with bees.
Twice a week, during the remainder of my stay at Frapesle, I carried out the long business of this poetical structure, for which I needed every variety of grass, and I studied them all with care, less as a botanist than as an artist, and with regard to their sentiment rather than their form. To find a flower where it grew I often walked immense distances, along the river bank, through the dells, to the top of cliffs, across the sand-hills and commons, gathering ideas from among clumps of heath. In these walks I discovered for myself pleasures unknown to the student who lives in meditation, to the husbandman engaged on some special culture, to the artisan tied to the town, to the merchant nailed to his countinghouse, but known to some foresters, to some woodsmen, to some dreamers.
Nature has certain effects of boundless meaning, rising to the level of the greatest intellectual ideas. Thus, a blossoming heath covered with diamonds of dew that hang on every leaf sparkling in the sun, a thing of infinite beauty for one single eye that may happen to see it. Or a forest nook, shut in by tumbled boulders, broken by willows, carpeted with moss, dotted with juniper shrubs—it scares you by its wild, hurtled, fearful aspect, and the cry of the hawk comes up to you. Or a scorching sandy common with no vegetation; a stony, precipitous plateau, the horizon reminding you of the desert—but there I found an exquisite and lonely flower, a pulsatilla waving its violet silk pennon in honor of its golden stamens; a pathetic image of my fair idol, alone in her valley! Or again, broad pools over which nature flings patches of greenery, a sort of transition between animal and vegetable being, and in a few days life is there—floating plants and insects, like a world in the upper air. Or again, a cottage with its cabbage garden, its vineyard, its fences, overhanging a bog, and surrounded by a few meagre fields of rye—emblematic of many a humble life. Or a long forest avenue, like the nave of a cathedral where the pillars are trees, their branches meeting like the groins of a vault, and at the end a distant glade seen through the foliage, dappled with light and shade, or glowing in the ruddy beams of sunset like the painted glass window of a choir, filled with birds for choristers. Then, as you come out of the grove, a chalky fallow where full-fed snakes wriggle over the hot, crackling moss, and vanish into their holes after raising their graceful, proud heads. And over these pictures cast floods of sunshine, rippling like a nourishing tide, or piles of gray cloud in bars like the furrows of an old man’s brow, or the cool tones of a faintly yellow sky banded with pale light—and listen! You will hear vague harmonies in the depth of bewildering silence.
During the months of
