departed toward the flower-covered Antilles. They listened to the
roaring of the sea; robes of muslin glided upon the verandas, and they
died perhaps looking back with regret on these streets, these shops,
these thresholds, these gardens, this brook, and this mountain
torrent.

When I go to my little farm I say to myself that this is where they
once were. They brought their luncheon in a little basket, and one of
them carried a guitar. And young girls surely followed swiftly. Song
stirred among the damp hedgerows. An unutterable love frightened the
birds, the mulberries were green. They kept time as they walked. A
young girl's cry stirred the air, a big hat turned the corner of the
road, a clear laugh rose from the rain-torn eglantines; then hearts
beat when, in the bright dog-days, the black barns softened the
clucking of the hens under the scarlet sky of the south.

...This guitar or another I heard in the courtyard of my Huguenot
great-aunts, one summer's evening when I was four years old. The
courtyard slept in the white twilight, the roofs shed an unimaginable
tenderness upon the climbing rosebushes and the bright paving-stones.
Some one sitting on a beam was making merry at the expense of my
childhood and my white apron. My great uncle sang some melody from the
capital. I can see him again, standing upright with his head thrown
back. The air trembled softly. At the end of a roulade he made an
exaggerated and charming bow.

I bless you, oh humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter
my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other
distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and
watching the faces of the poor. But I reach the hillside where the