There was nothing outside to lure him before the time came when he would go out of his own accord.  His wisdom was in harmony with things.  His life was a work of music to him, and each discordant note warned him to be cautious.  He did not confuse the voice of the pack of hounds with the distant sound of bells, or the gesture of a man with that of a waving tree, or the detonation of a gun with a clap of thunder, or the latter with the rumbling of carts, or the cry of the hawk with the steam-whistle of threshing-machines.  Thus there was an entire language, whose words he knew to be his enemies.

Who can say from what source Rabbit obtained this prudence and this wisdom?  No one can explain these things, or tell whence or how they have come to him.  Their origin is lost in the night of time where everything is all confused and one.

Did he, perhaps, come out of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat at the time when the dove, which retains the sound of great waters in its cooing, brought the olive-branch, the sign that the great wave was subsiding?  Or had he been created, such as he is, with his short tail, his stubbly hide, his cleft lip, his floppy ear, and his trodden-down heel?  Did God, the Eternal, set him all ready-made beneath the laurels of Paradise?

Lying crouched beneath a rosebush he had, perhaps, seen Eve, and watched her when she had wandered amid the irises, displaying the grace of her brown legs like a prancing young horse, and extending her golden breasts before the mystic pomegranates.  Or was he at first nothing but an incandescent mist?  Had he already lived in the heart of the porphyries?  Had he, incombustible, escaped from their boiling lava, in order to inhabit each in turn the cell of granite and of the alga before he dared show his nose to the world?  Did he owe his pitch-black eyes to the molten jet, his fur to the clayey ooze, his soft ears to the sea-wrack, his ardent blood to the liquid fire?

...His origins mattered little to him at this moment; he was resting peacefully in his marl-pit.  It was in a sultry August toward the end of a heavy afternoon.  The sky was of the deep-blue color of a plum, puffed out here and there, as if ready to burst upon the plain.

Soon the rain began to patter on the leaves of the brake.  Faster and faster came the drumming of the long rods of rain.  But Rabbit was not afraid, because the rain fell in accordance with a rhythm which was very familiar to him.  And besides the rain did not strike him for it had not yet been able to pierce the thick vault of green above him.  A single drop only fell to the bottom of the marl-pit, and splashed and always fell again at the same place.

So there was nothing in this concert to trouble the heart of Rabbit.  He was quite familiar with the song in which the tears of the rain form the strophes, and he knew that neither dog, nor man, nor fox, nor hawk had any part in it.  The sky was like a harp on which the silver strings of the streaming rain were strung from above down to the earth.  And down here below every single thing made this harp resound in its own peculiar fashion, and in turn it again took up its own melody.  Under the green fingers of the leaves the crystal strings sounded faint and hollow.  It was as though it were the voice of the soul of the mists.