Down below, beneath the windows overlooking the sea, lay the garden.
All the houses fronting the cliff had similar little gardens, giving,
as the French idiom so prettily puts it, upon the sea. But compared to
these others, ours was as a rose of Sharon blooming in the midst of
little deserts. Renard had been entirely right about this particular
bit of earth attached to our villa. It was a gem of a garden. It was a
French garden, and therefore, entirely as a matter of course, it had
walls. It was as cut off from the rest of the world as if it had been a
prison or a fortification.

The Frenchman, above all others, appears to have the true sentiment of
seclusion, when the society of trees and flowers is to be enjoyed. Next
to woman, nature is his fetish. True to his national taste in dress, he
prefers that both should be costumed _a la Parisienne_; but as poet and
lover, it is his instinct to build a wall about his idol, that he may
enjoy his moments of expansion unseen and unmolested. This square of
earth, for instance, was not much larger than the space covered by the
chamber roof above us; and yet, with the high walls towering over the
rose-stalks, it was as secluded as a monk's cloister. We found it,
indeed, on later acquaintance, as poetic and delicately sensuous a
retreat as the romance-writers would wish us to believe did those
mediaeval connoisseurs of comfort, when, with sandalled feet, they
paced their own convent garden-walks. Fouchet was a broken-down
shopkeeper; but somewhere hidden within, there lurked the soul of a
Maecenas; he knew how to arrange a feast--of roses. The garden was a
bit of greensward, not much larger than a pocket handkerchief; but the
grass had the right emerald hue, and one's feet sank into the rich turf
as into the velvet of an oriental rug. Small as was the enclosure,
between the espaliers and the flower-beds serpentined minute paths of
glistening pebbles. Nothing which belonged to a garden had been