Lying amid the wild laurel the lamb of the Gospel became visible again.  Its paw rested under its nose, and was still bleeding.  The roads over which it had passed had been hard, but soon it would be fully restored by the slightly acid sweetness of the myrtles.  Even now it was quivering as it listened to its scattered companions.

On entering this Paradise to dwell therein the sheep of Francis saw the lamb of Jean de la Fontaine amid the forget-me-nots which were of the mirror-like color of the waves.  It no longer disputed with the wolf of the fable.  It drank, and the water did not become turbid thereat.  The untamed spring over which the two hundred year old ivy seemed to have thrown a shadow of bitterness, streamed on amid the grass with its broken waves in which were mirrored the snowy tremblings of the lamb.

And high on the slopes of the happy valleys they saw the sheep of those heroes that Cervantes tells about, all of whom were sick at heart for the love of one and the same girl and left their city to lead the life of shepherds in a far-away country.  These sheep had the gentlest of voices, like hearts that secretly love their own sufferings.  They drank from the wild thyme the always new, burning tears which their bucolic poets had let fall like dew from the cups of their eyes.

At the horizon of this Paradise there rose a confused murmur like that of the Ocean.  It consisted of the broken sobbing of flutes or clarinets, of cries reechoed from the abysses, of the baying of restless dogs, and of the fall of a moss-covered stone into the void.  It was the tumult of the waterfalls high above the noise of the torrents.  It was like the voice of a people on the march toward the promised land, toward the grapes without name, toward the fiery spikes of grain; and mingled with this sound was the braying of pregnant she-asses, that were laden with heavy containers of milk and the mantles of the herdsmen and salt and cheeses which were brittle like chalk.

* * * * *

The fourth Paradise in its almost indescribable barrenness was that of the wolves.

At the summit of a treeless mountain, in the desolation of the wind, beneath a penetrating fog, they felt the voluptuous joy of martyrdom.  They sustained themselves with their hunger.  They experienced a bitter joy in feeling that they were abandoned, that never for more than an instant—­and then only under the greatest suffering—­had they been able to renounce their lust for blood.  They were the disinherited, possessed of the dream that could never be realized.  For a long time they had not been able to approach the heavenly lambs whose white eyelashes winked in the green light.  And as none of these animals ever died, they could no longer lie in wait for the body which the shepherd threw to the eternal laughter of the torrent.

And the wolves were resigned.  Their fur, bald as the rock, was pitiable.  A sort of miserable grandeur reigned in this strange abode.  One felt that this destitution was so tragic and so inexorable that one would have tenderly kissed the forehead of these poor flesh-eating beasts even had one surprised them in slaying the lambs.  The beauty of this Paradise in which the friend of Francis now found his home was that of desolation and hopeless despair.