Oh! my goodness! there was the prettiest little Easter daisy in the
world, and flitting about it was a charming microscopical gnat.
This flower of the fields was growing peaceably and in accordance with
the sweet law of nature, in the open, in the centre of Paris, between a
couple of streets, two paces from the Palais-Royal, four paces from the
Carrousel, amid passers-by, omnibuses and the King’s carriages.
This wild flower, neighbour of the pavement, opened up a wide field of
thought. Who could have foreseen, two years ago, that a daisy would be
growing on this spot! If, as on the ground adjoining, there had never
been anything but houses, that is to say, proprietors, tenants, and hail
porters, careful residents extinguishing candle and fire at night before
going to sleep, never would there have been a wild flower here.
How many things, how many plays that failed or were applauded, how
many ruined families, how many incidents, how many adventures, how many
catastrophes were summed up in this flower! To all those who lived upon
the crowd that was nightly summoned here, what a spectre this flower
would have been had it appeared to them two years ago! What a labyrinth
is destiny and what mysterious combinations there were that led up to
the advent of this enchanting little yellow sun with its white rays.
It required a theatre and a conflagration, which are the gaiety and the
terror of a city, one of the most joyous inventions of man and one of
the most terrible visitations of God, bursts of laughter for thirty
years and whirlwinds of flame for thirty horn’s to produce this Easter
daisy, the delight of a gnat.