The changeable month of March had arrived, and with it the intoxication
of spring, joyful for the young, sad for those who are declining.
And Gracieuse had commenced again to sit, in the twilight of the
lengthened days, on the stone bench in front of her door.
Oh! the old stone benches, around the houses, made, in the past ages,
for the reveries of the soft evenings and for the eternally similar
conversations of lovers--!
Gracieuse's house was very ancient, like most houses in that Basque
country, where, less than elsewhere, the years change the things.--It
had two stories; a large projecting roof in a steep slope; walls like a
fortress which were whitewashed every summer; very small windows,
with settings of cut granite and green blinds. Above the front door, a
granite lintel bore an inscription in relief; words complicated and long
which, to French eyes resembled nothing known. It said: “May the Holy
Virgin bless this home, built in the year 1630 by Peter Detcharry,
beadle, and his wife Damasa Irribarne, of the village of Istaritz.” A
small garden two yards wide, surrounded by a low wall so that one could
see the passers-by, separated the house from the road; there was a
beautiful rose-laurel, extending its southern foliage above the evening
bench, and there were yuccas, a palm tree, and enormous bunches of
those hortensias which are giants here, in this land of shade, in this
lukewarm climate, so often enveloped by clouds. In the rear was a badly
closed orchard which rolled down to an abandoned path, favorable to
escalades of lovers.
What mornings radiant with light there were in that spring, and what
tranquil, pink evenings!
After a week of full moon which kept the fields till day-light blue with
rays, and when the band of Itchoua ceased to work,--so clear was their
habitual domain, so illuminated were the grand, vaporous backgrounds of
the Pyrenees and of Spain--the frontier fraud was resumed more ardently,
as soon as the thinned crescent had become discreet and early setting.
Then, in these beautiful times, smuggling by night was exquisite; a
trade of solitude and of meditation when the mind of the naive and very
pardonable defrauders was elevated unconsciously in the contemplation of
the sky and of the darkness animated by stars--as it happens to the mind
of the sea folk watching, on the nocturnal march of vessels, and as it
happened formerly to the mind of the shepherds in antique Chaldea.
It was favorable also and tempting for lovers, that tepid period which
followed the full moon of March, for it was dark everywhere around the
houses, dark in all the paths domed with trees,--and very dark, behind
the Detcharry orchard, on the abandoned path where nobody ever passed.
Gracieuse lived more and more on her bench in front of her door.
It was here that she was seated, as every year, to receive and look at
the carnival dancers: those groups of young boys and of young girls of
Spain or of France, who, every spring, organize themselves for several
days in a wandering band, and, all dressed in the same pink or white
colors, traverse the frontier village, dancing the fandango in front of
houses, with castanets--
She stayed later and later in this place which she liked, under the
shelter of the rose-laurel coming into bloom, and sometimes even, she
came out noiselessly through the window, like a little, sly fox, to
breathe there at length, after her mother had gone to bed. Ramuntcho
knew this and, every night, the thought of that bench troubled his
sleep.