“I’m off!” said Hohenfels, with a rapid movement of retreat.

“But you are forgetting your—­”

“What, my gloves?”

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“No, the umbrella.”  And I presented him the heaviest and longest and oldest of my collection.  He laughed:  it was a hoary canopy which we had used beside the Neckar and in Heidelberg—­“a pleasant town,” as the old song says, “when it has done raining.”  We sealed a compact over the indestructible German umbrella.  I agreed to defer for a fortnight my departure for Marly:  on his side he made a solemn vow to come there on the first of May, and there receive in full and without wincing the particulars of my Progressive Geography.  As he passed by the window I took care that he should catch a glimpse of me seated by accident in a strong light, my smoking-cap crowded down to my spectacles, and my nose buried in my old geographers.

* * * * *

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For the next few days the weather supported the side of Hohenfels.  It scattered rain, sunshine and spits of snow.  At last the sun got the upper hand and remained master.  The wisterias tumbled their cataracts of blue blossoms down the spouts; rare flowers, of minute proportions, burst from the button-holes of the young horsemen going to the Bois; the gloves of the American colony became lilac; hyacinths, daffodils and pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to the windows of the sewing-girls.  Overhead, in the steaming and cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun.  “Apelles of the flowers,” as an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the horticultural market.

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This sort of country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me.  It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather.  I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy.  I fancied that wings were sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, and that they were the volatile wings of the moth or dragon-fly.  But to establish myself at Marly before the baron, would not that be a breach of compact?  Would he not make it a casus belli?  Luckily, we were getting through April:  to-morrow it would be the twenty-eighth.

On that memorable morning the sun rose strong and bright, and photographed a brilliant idea upon my cerebellum.

I would undertake a pedestrian attack upon Marly by winding my way around the suburbs of the capital.  What more appropriate, for a profound geographer and tourist, than to measure with my walking-stick that enormous bed of gypsum, at the centre of which, like a bee in a sugar-basin, Paris sits and hums?