Since then I have understood the flowers and that their families belonged together and have a natural affinity, and are not merely divided into classes as an aid to our slow memories.  Toward what solution do these geometries in action, which are plants, progress?  I do not know.  But there is a fascinating mystery in considering that even as species correspond to certain geological periods and thus group their sympathies, even so to-day they group themselves according to the seasons.  What correspondence is there between the character of the shivering and snowy liliaceous plants of winter and the purple solanaceous plants of autumn?  And then there are still other delightful dispositions which are due far less to the artifice of man than to the consent of certain species to regard others as their friends and not to pine away beside them.  How sweet is the village garden where the gleaming lily, like those gods who often visit the humble, lives amid the cabbages, the blue leek, and the scallions, which boil in the black pot of the poor!  How I love the peasant gardens at noonday when the mournful blue shadow of the vegetables sleeps in the white squares of granular earth, when the cock calls the silence, and when the buzzard, slanting and wheeling, makes the scuttling hen cluck!  There are the flowers of simple loves, the flowers of the young wife who will dry the blue lavender to scent her coarse sheets.  And in this garden grows also the flower of the rondel—­the humble gilliflower with its simple perfume.  There is also the faithful box, each leaf of which is a small mirror of azure, and the hollyhock in which the sweet and pure flame of melancholy corollas burns; they are the flowers of religion vowed to silence and austerity.

And I love also the flora of the meadows:  the meadow-sweet swayed by the breezes, rocked by the murmur of the brook.  Its perfumed crown is adorned like the water-beetles, more iridescent than the throats of humming-birds.

It is the beloved of the greensward, the bride of the grassy borders.

But it is in the deep recesses of old deserted parks that the plants are most mysterious.  There dwell those which we call old flowers, such as the ground-lilac, the belladonna-amaryllis, the crown-imperial.  Elsewhere they would die.  Here they persist, guarded by the favor of the age-old trees, strange trees, the names of which have disappeared.  And these affected and distinguished blossoms raise their swaying heads only when, murmuring across the liquadambars and the maples, the wind moans like Chateaubriand.

* * * * *

The very mournfulness of the little town is pleasing to me; I love its streets of dark shops, the worn thresholds, and the gardens.  In the fine season they seem to float against a background of blue mist which is a confusion of hollyhocks, glycins, trellises; or again they seem patchy as the skin of asses, with drying rags above the hedges of battered boxwood.  The tanner’s brook drifts by with the pale mother-of-pearl of the sky, and reflects sharply the rooftops amid the slimy plants; the mountain torrent, which hollows the rocks, gleams, twines and flows away.