It has the shape of a heart, and is delightful.  It is shaded by a very old tree, under which justice was formerly administered.  That is why they call it the Great Tree, although there are greater ones.  In winter it is dark, like a perforated umbrella.  In summer it gives the bright green shadow of a parasol.  Beside the tree a tall crucifix dwells in the Place forever.

The Place is swarming and undulating.  Peasants from the surrounding country, in their plain cotton caps, are waiting in the old corner of the Rue Neuve, heaped together like eggs.  These people are loaded with provisions.  At the farther end, square-paved, one picks out swarthy outlines of the Epinal type, and faces as brightly colored as apples.  Groups of children flutter and chirrup; little girls with their dolls play at being mothers, and little boys play at brigands.  Respectable people take their stand more ceremoniously than the common crowd, and talk business piously.

Farther away is the road, which April’s illumination adorns all along the lines of trees with embroidery of shadow and of gold, where bicycles tinkle and carriages rumble echoingly; and the shining river,—­those long-drawn sheets of water, whereon the sun spreads sheets of light and scatters blinding points.  Looking along the road, on either side of its stone-hard surface, one sees the pleasant, cultivated earth, the bits of land sewn to each other, and many-hued, brown or green as the billiard cloth, then paling in the distance.  Here and there, on this map in colors, copses bulge forth.  The by-roads are pricked out with trees, which follow each other artlessly and divide the infantile littleness of orchards.

This landscape holds us by the soul.  It is a watercolor now (for it rained a little last night), with its washed stones, its tiles varnished anew, its roofs that are half slate and half light, its shining pavements, water-jeweled in places, its delicately blue sky, with clouds like silky paper; and between two house-fronts of yellow ocher and tan, against the purple velvet of distant forests, there is the neighboring steeple, which is like ours and yet different.  Roundly one’s gaze embraces all the panorama, which is delightful as the rainbow.

From the Place, then, where one feels himself so abundantly at home, we enter the church.  From the depths of this thicket of lights, the good priest murmurs the great infinite speech to us, blesses us, embraces us severally and altogether, like father and mother both.  In the manorial pew, the foremost of all, one glimpses the Marquis of Monthyon, who has the air of an officer, and his mother-in-law, Baroness Grille, who is dressed like an ordinary lady.

Emerging from church, the men go away; the women swarm out more grudgingly and come to a standstill together; then all the buzzing groups scatter.

At noon the shops close.  The fine ones do it unassisted; the others close by the antics of some good man who exerts himself to carry and fit the shutters.  Then there is a great void.