On one of the highest and most generally solitary summits of the park
of St. Cloud, where the rounded hill descends in two separate slopes,
one towards the valley of Sèvres, and the other towards the hollow
where the Château stands, there is an open space where three long
avenues meet. From thence the eye discovers from afar the rare
passengers that intrude on the solitude of the place. The hill, like a
promontory, overlooks the plain of Issy, the course of the Seine, and
the road to Versailles; its summit, clothed and overshaded by the
forest which fills up the triangular intervals between the three
avenues, appears like the rounded basin of a lake of which grass and
foliage are the billows. If one looks towards Sèvres, one sees only a
long and sloping meadow stretching down towards the river like a
verdant and undulating cascade, which, after a rapid descent, loses
itself at the bottom of the valley in dark masses of thickets stocked
with deer. Beyond these thickets, on the other side of the Seine, the
blue slated roofs of Meudon, and the waving tops of the majestic trees
of its park, stand out in the blue summer sky. We often came to sit on
this hill, which has all the elevation of a promontory, the silence and
shade of a valley, and the solitude of a desert. The lungs play freer
there; the ear is less disturbed by the sounds of earth; the soul can
better wing its flight beyond the horizon of this life.
We went there one morning early in May, at the hour when the forest is
peopled only by the deer, which bound and skip in its lonely paths. Now
and then a gamekeeper crosses the extremity of one of the avenues, like
a black speck on the horizon. We sat down under the seventh tree of the
semi-circle round the open space, looking towards the meadows of
Sèvres. Centuries have been required to frame that sturdy oak, and to
bend its gnarled branches; its roots, swelling with sap to nourish and
support its trunk, have burst through the sod at its feet, and form a
moss-covered seat, of which the oak is the back, and its lower leaves
the natural canopy. The morning was as serene and transparent as the
waters of the sea at sunrise under the green headlands of the islands
of the Archipelago. The ardent rays of an almost summer sun fell from
the clear sky on the wooded hill, and then rose again from out of the
thickets in exhalations warm as the waves which expire in the shade
after having imbibed the sunshine. There was no other sound than that
of the fall of some dry leaves of the preceding winter, which, as the
sap rose and throbbed, fell at the foot of the tree, to make room for
the new and tender foliage. Whole flights of birds dashed against the
branches round their nests, and there was one vague, universal hum of
insects that revelled in the light, and rose and fell, like a living
dust, at the least undulation of the flowering grass.