rendezvous. You go to bed in the fields amid marguerites and wild
poppies, and, with eyes wide open, you watch the going down of
the sun, and descry in the distance the little village, with its
pointed clock-tower, which sounds the hour of midnight.

"You sit down by the side of a spring which gushes out from the
foot of an oak, amid a covering of fragile herbs, growing and
redolent of life. You go down on your knees, bend forward, and
drink the cold and pellucid water, wetting your mustache and
nose; you drink it with a physical pleasure, as though you were
kissing the spring, lip to lip. Sometimes, when you encounter a
deep hole, along the course of these tiny brooks, you plunge into
it, quite naked, and on your skin, from head to foot, like an icy
and delicious caress, you feel the lovely and gentle quivering of
the current.

"You are gay on the hills, melancholy on the verge of pools,
exalted when the sun is crowned in an ocean of blood-red shadows,
and when it casts on the rivers its red reflection. And at night,
under the moon, as it passes across the vault of heaven, you
think of things, singular things, which would never have occurred
to your mind under the brilliant light of day.

"So, in wandering through the same country we are in this year, I
came to the little village of Benouville, on the Falaise, between
Yport and Etretat. I came from Fecamp, following the coast, a
high coast, perpendicular as a wall, with projecting and rugged
rocks falling sheer down into the sea. I had walked since the
morning on the close clipped grass, as smooth and as yielding as
a carpet. Singing lustily, I walked with long strides, looking