Yesterday, then, I went to admire the year's gentle and gorgeous floral
feast, the last which the snows of December and January, like a broad
belt of peace, sleep, silence and night, separate from the delicious
festivals that commence again with the germination (powerful already,
though hardly visible) that seeks the light in February.
They are there, under the immense transparent dome, the noble flowers of
the month of fogs; they are there, at the royal meeting-place, all the
grave little autumn fairies, whose dances and attitudes seem to have
been struck motionless with a single word. The eye that recognizes them
and has learned to love them perceives, at the first pleased glance,
that they have actively and dutifully continued to evolve towards their
uncertain ideal. Go back for a moment to their modest origin: look at
the poor buttercup of yore, the humble little crimson or damask rose
that still smiles sadly, along the roads full of dead leaves, in the
scanty garden-patches of our villages; compare with them these enormous
masses and fleeces of snow, these disks and globes of red copper, these
spheres of old silver, these trophies of alabaster and amethyst, this
delirious prodigy of petals which seems to be trying to exhaust to its
last riddle the world of autumnal shapes and shades which the winter
entrusts to the bosom of the sleeping woods; let the unwonted and
unexpected varieties pass before your eyes; admire and appraise them.
Here, for instance, is the marvellous family of the stars: flat stars,
bursting stars, diaphanous stars, solid and fleshly stars, milky ways
and constellations of the earth that correspond with those of the
firmament. Here are the proud plumes that await the diamonds of the dew;
here, to put our dreams to shame, the fascinating poem of unreal
tresses: wise, precise and meticulous tresses; mad and miraculous
tresses; honeyed moonbeams, golden bushes and flaming whirlpools; curls
of fair and smiling maidens, of fleeing nymphs, of passionate
bacchantes, of swooning sirens, of cold virgins, of frolicsome children,
whom angels, mothers, fauns, lovers have caressed with their calm or
quivering hands. And then, here, pell-mell, are the monsters that cannot
be classed: hedgehogs, spiders, curly endives, pine-apples, pompons,
Tudor roses, shells, vapours, breaths, stalactites of ice and falling
snow, a throbbing hail of sparks, wings, flashes, fluffy, pulpy, fleshy
things, wattles, bristles, funeral piles and sky-rockets, bursts of
light, a stream of fire and sulphur.