As I thought that my chosen lady dwelt in Touraine, I inhaled the air with rapture; I saw a blue in the sky which I have never since perceived elsewhere.
Though mentally I was in ecstasy, I seemed to be very ill; my mother was at once alarmed and remorseful. Like animals aware of approaching distemper, I would creep into a corner of the garden to dream of the kisses I had stolen. A few days after the memorable ball my mother began to ascribe my neglect of study, my indifference to her searching looks, my heedlessness of her irony, and my gloomy behavior, to the natural development of a growing man. Country air, the universal remedy for every malady of which science can give no account, was regarded as the best means of curing me of my apathy. My mother decided that I should spend a few days at Frapesle, a château on the Indre, between Montvazon and Azay-le-Rideau, with a friend of hers, to whom, no doubt, she gave her private instructions.
On the day when I was thus given the key of the fields, I had plunged so deeply into the ocean of love that I had crossed it. I knew not my fair one’s name; what could I call her or where could I find her? To whom indeed could I speak of her? My natural shyness increased the unaccountable terrors which possess a young heart at the first flutter of love, and made me begin with the melancholy which is the end of a hopeless passion. I was quite content to come and go and wander about the country, with the childlike spirit that is ready for anything and has a certain tinge of chivalry; I was prepared to hunt through all the country-houses of Touraine, wandering on foot, and saying at each pretty turret, “It will be there!”
So one Thursday morning I left Tours by the Saint-Eloy gate, I crossed the bridges of Saint-Sauveur, I reached Poncher, my nose in the air in front of every house I passed, and was on the road to Chinon. For the first time in my life I could rest under a tree, walk fast or slowly as I list, without being called to account by anyone. To a poor creature so utterly crushed by the various despotisms which weigh more or less on every young life, the first taste of freedom, though exerted in trifles, brought unspeakable expansion to my soul.
Several reasons combined to make that a high day full of delights. In my childhood my walks had never taken me more than a league out of the town. My excursions in the neighborhood of Pont-le-Voy and the walks I had taken in Paris had not surfeited me with rural beauty. Nevertheless, I had retained from the earliest impressions of my life a strong feeling of the beauty inherent in the scenery round Tours, with which I was familiar. Thus, though I was new to what constitutes the poetry of a site, I was unconsciously exacting, as men are who have conceived of the ideal of an art without ever having practised it.
To go to the château of Frapesle, those who walk or ride shorten the way by crossing the common known as the Landes de Charlemagne, a waste lying at the top of the plateau which divides the valley of the Cher from that of the Indre, and which is reached by a crossroad from Champy. This flat and sandy down, depressing enough for about a league, ends in a coppice adjoining the road to Saché, the village nearest to Frapesle. This country lane, leading into the Chinon road at some distance beyond Ballan, skirts an undulating plain devoid of remarkable features as far as the hamlet of Artanne. Thence a valley opens down to the Loire, from Montvazon at the head; the hills seem to rebound under the country-houses on each range of slopes; it is a glorious emerald basin, and at the bottom the Indre winds in serpentine curves. I was startled by the view into a rapturous astonishment for which the dullness of the Landes or the fatigue of my walk had prepared me:—If this woman, the flower of her sex, inhabits a spot on earth, it must be this!
At the thought I leaned against a walnut-tree; and now, whenever I revisit that beloved valley, I go to rest under its boughs. Under that tree, the confidant of all my thoughts, I examine myself as to the changes that may have taken place during the time that has elapsed since last I left it.
My heart had not deceived me: it was there that she dwelt; the first château I could see on a shelf of the down was her home. When I sat down under my walnut-tree, the noonday sun struck sparks from the slates of her roof and the glass panes of her windows. Her cambric dress was the white spot I could see among some vines under a pleached alley. She was, as you know already, though as yet you know nothing, the Lily of this Valley, where she grew for heaven, filling it with the fragrance of her virtues. I saw an emblem of infinite love with nothing to keep it alive but an object only once seen, in the long watery ribbon which glistens in the sun between two green banks, in the rows of poplars which deck that vale of love with moving tracery, in the oak woods thrust forward between the vineyards on the hillsides rounded by the
