The little place is charming when the grasshopper shrills in the summer’s elms and the autumn wind scours it, or when the rains streak it.  There is a little public garden that Bernardin de Saint Pierre would have loved; in May the night there is dense, blue, and soft in the chestnut-trees.

For years I have lived here, whence my grandfather and a great uncle departed toward the flower-covered Antilles.  They listened to the roaring of the sea; robes of muslin glided upon the verandas, and they died perhaps looking back with regret on these streets, these shops, these thresholds, these gardens, this brook, and this mountain torrent.

When I go to my little farm I say to myself that this is where they once were.  They brought their luncheon in a little basket, and one of them carried a guitar.  And young girls surely followed swiftly.  Song stirred among the damp hedgerows.  An unutterable love frightened the birds, the mulberries were green.  They kept time as they walked.  A young girl’s cry stirred the air, a big hat turned the corner of the road, a clear laugh rose from the rain-torn eglantines; then hearts beat when, in the bright dog-days, the black barns softened the clucking of the hens under the scarlet sky of the south.

...This guitar or another I heard in the courtyard of my Huguenot great-aunts, one summer’s evening when I was four years old.  The courtyard slept in the white twilight, the roofs shed an unimaginable tenderness upon the climbing rosebushes and the bright paving-stones.  Some one sitting on a beam was making merry at the expense of my childhood and my white apron.  My great uncle sang some melody from the capital.  I can see him again, standing upright with his head thrown back.  The air trembled softly.  At the end of a roulade he made an exaggerated and charming bow.

I bless you, oh humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and watching the faces of the poor.  But I reach the hillside where the prickly furze is spread, and in musing upon my difficulties I am filled with a beneficent gentleness.  To-day it is no longer the coarse and disdainful laugh of the public, nor the terrible doubt of everything, which disturbs me.  The laugh of my detractors has grown wearied, and I have become indifferent to what I am.  Yet I have become grave toward myself and others.  It is with an apprehensive joy that I regard the heedlessness of the happy.  I have learned what misery may spring from love, what blindness is born of a glance.  And it is because of what I have suffered that I would bestow a sad and slow caress on those who have not yet known anything but happiness.

* * * * *

The open door, the blue sky, the watering of the grass and the gilliflowers, and the hyacinths, and a single bird which chirps, and my dogs stretched on the ground and the rosebushes with their thick stems, the verdure of the lilacs, and a clock that is striking, a wasp which flies straight and marks the meadow with the lines of its golden vibration, and stops, hesitates, sets off again, is silent and buzzes....