vases. The gold of the arabesques is ruddy, for rust has added its
tints, but this entrance, called "the gate of the Avenue," which
plainly shows the hand of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les
Aigues owes it), seems to me none the less beautiful for that. At the
end of each ha-ha the walls of the park, built of rough-hewn stone,
begin. These stones, set in a mortar made of reddish earth, display
their variegated colors, the warm yellows of the silex, the white of
the lime carbonates, the russet browns of the sandstone, in many a
fantastic shape. As you first enter it, the park is gloomy, the walls
are hidden by creeping plants and by trees that for fifty years have
heard no sound of axe. One might think it a virgin forest, made primeval
again through some phenomenon granted exclusively to forests. The trunks
of the trees are swathed with lichen which hangs from one to another.
Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves, droops from every fork of the
branches where moisture settles. I have found gigantic ivies, wild
arabesques which flourish only at fifty leagues from Paris, here where
land does not cost enough to make one sparing of it. The landscape on
such free lines covers a great deal of ground. Nothing is smoothed
off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches are full of water, frogs are
tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the woodland flowers bloom,
and the heather is as beautiful as that I have seen on your mantle-shelf
in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by Florine. This mystery is
intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The forest odors, beloved
of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight in the tiny mosses,
the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the balsams, the wild
thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star of the yellow
water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations came to my
nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their soul? I
seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding alley.