I was forced to calm her, to promise never to cause her pain, and to love her at twenty-one years of age as old men love their youngest child.

The next day I went early.  There were no flowers in the vases of her gray salon.  I rushed into the fields and vineyards to make her two bouquets; but as I gathered the flowers, one by one, cutting their long stalks and admiring their beauty, the thought occurred to me that the colors and foliage had a poetry, a harmony, which meant something to the understanding while they charmed the eye; just as musical melodies awaken memories in hearts that are loving and beloved.  If color is light organized, must it not have a meaning of its own, as the combinations of the air have theirs?  I called in the assistance of Jacques and Madeleine, and all three of us conspired to surprise our dear one.  I arranged, on the lower steps of the portico, where we established our floral headquarters, two bouquets by which I tried to convey a sentiment.  Picture to yourself a fountain of flowers gushing from the vases and falling back in curving waves; my message springing from its bosom in white roses and lilies with their silver cups.  All the blue flowers, harebells, forget-me-nots, and ox-tongues, whose tines, caught from the skies, blended so well with the whiteness of the lilies, sparkled on this dewy texture; were they not the type of two purities, the one that knows nothing, the other that knows all; an image of the child, an image of the martyr?  Love has its blazon, and the countess discerned it inwardly.  She gave me a poignant glance which was like the cry of a soldier when his wound is touched; she was humbled but enraptured too.  My reward was in that glance; to refresh her heart, to have given her comfort, what encouragement for me!  Then it was that I pressed the theories of Pere Castel into the service of love, and recovered a science lost to Europe, where written pages have supplanted the flowery missives of the Orient with their balmy tints.  What charm in expressing our sensations through these daughters of the sun, sisters to the flowers that bloom beneath the rays of love!  Before long I communed with the flora of the fields, as a man whom I met in after days at Grandlieu communed with his bees.

Twice a week during the remainder of my stay at Frapesle I continued the slow labor of this poetic enterprise, for the ultimate accomplishment of which I needed all varieties of herbaceous plants; into these I made a deep research, less as a botanist than as a poet, studying their spirit rather than their form.  To find a flower in its native haunts I walked enormous distances, beside the brooklets, through the valleys, to the summit of the cliffs, across the moorland, garnering thoughts even from the heather.  During these rambles I initiated myself into pleasures unthought of by the man of science who lives in meditation, unknown to the horticulturist busy with specialities, to the artisan fettered to a city, to the merchant