You sing, Jeanne, of course.  You remind me of a bird.  You have all the quick and easy graces of the skylark.  Why should you not have the skylark’s voice?

Fabien, you are dropping into poetry!

CHAPTER VI

THE FLOWER-SHOW

April 3d.

For a month I have written nothing in this brown notebook.  But to-day there is plenty to put down, and worth the trouble too.

Let me begin with the first shock.  This morning, my head crammed with passages from Latin authors, I leaned my brow against the pane of my window which looks on the garden.  The garden is not mine, of course, since I live on the fourth floor; but I have a view of the big weeping-willow in the centre, the sanded path that runs around it, and the four walls lined with borders, one of which separates it from the huge premises of the Carmelites.  It is an almost deserted garden.  The first-floor tenant hardly ever walks there.  His son, a schoolboy of seventeen, was there this morning.  He stood two feet from the street wall, motionless, with head thrown back, whistling a monotonous air, which seemed to me like a signal.  Before him, however, was nothing but the moss on the old wall gleaming like golden lights.  People do not whistle to amuse stones nor yet moss.  Farther off, on the other side of the street, the windows of the opposite houses stretched away in long straight lines, most of them standing open.

I thought:  “The bird is somewhere there.  Some small Abigail with her white cap will look out in a moment.”

The suspicion was stupid and ill-natured.  How rash are our lightest judgments!  Suddenly the school-boy took one step forward, swept his hand quickly along the moss as if he were trying to catch a fly, and ran off to his mother triumphant, delighted, beside himself, with an innocent gray lizard on the tips of his fingers.

“I’ve got him!  I’ve got him!  He was basking in the sun and I charmed him!”

“Basking in the sun!” This was a revelation to me.  I flung up the window.  Yes, it was true.  Warmth and light lay everywhere:  on the roofs still glistening with last night’s showers; across the sky, whose gay blue proclaimed that winter was done.  I looked downward and saw what I had not seen before:  the willow bursting into bud; the hepatica in flower at the foot of the camellias, which had ceased to bloom; the pear-trees in the Carmelites’ garden flushing red as the sap rose within them; and upon the dead trunk of a fig-tree was a blackbird, escaped from the Luxembourg, who, on tiptoe, with throat outstretched, drunk with delight, answered some far-off call that the wind brought to him, singing, as if in woodland depths, the rapturous song of the year’s new birth.  Then, oh! then, I could contain myself no longer.  I ran down the stairs four at a time, cursing Paris and the Junian Latins who had been cheating me of the