Thursday evening was a time of great rejoicing with me whenever a
terrible storm descended upon Limoise, and thus made it impossible for
me to return home that night.
It happened occasionally; and since I had had the experience, I used to
hope that it might occur often, and especially did I wish for a storm
when I had failed to prepare my lessons. One inhuman professor had
instituted Thursday tasks, and it was necessary for me to drag my text
and copy-books with me to Limoise; my beloved holidays, spent in the
sweet open air, were overcast by their dark shadow.
One evening at about eight o'clock the much desired storm broke upon
us with superb fury. Lucette and I were in the large drawing-room that
resounded with the noise of the thunder, and we felt none too safe
there. Its great wall-spaces were broken by only two or three old
engravings in ancient frames. Lucette, under her mother's direction,
was putting the finishing touches to a piece of needle work, and, on the
rather worn-out piano, I was playing, with the soft pedal down, one of
Rameau's dances; the old-fashioned music sounded exquisite to me as it
mingled with the noise of the great thunder claps.
When Lucette's work was completed, she turned over the leaves of my
copy-book lying on the table. After she had examined it she gave me a
meaning look, intended only for my eyes, that said as plainly as a look
can that she knew I had neglected my task. Suddenly she asked: “where
did you leave your Duruy's 'History'?”
My Duruy's “History”! Where indeed had I left it? It was a new book with
scarcely a blot in it. Great heavens! I had forgotten it and left it out
of doors at the far end of the garden in the most removed asparagus bed.
For my historical studies I had selected the asparagus bed which was
like a bit of copse, for the feathery green plants, past their season,
grew high and luxuriant; a hazel glen, leafy and impenetrable, and
as shady as a verdant grotto, was the spot I had chosen for the more
exacting and laborious work of Latin versification. As this time I was
scolded by Lucette's mother for my great carelessness, we decided to go
immediately and rescue the book.
We organized a search party, and at the head of it went a servant who
carried a stable-lantern; Lucette and I walked behind him. Our feet were
protected from the wet ground by wooden shoes, and with much difficulty
we held over us a large umbrella that the wind constantly turned inside
out.
Once outside I was no longer afraid; I opened my eyes wide and listened
with all my ears. Oh! how wonderful, and yet how sinister, the end of
the garden looked seen by those sudden and great flashes of green light
that shimmered and trembled about us from time to time, and then left us
blind in the blackness of the stormy night. And I shall never forget the
impression made upon me by the continual crashing of the branches of the
trees in the near-by oak forest.
We found Duruy's “History” in the asparagus bed all water soaked and mud
bespattered. Before the storm the snails, exhilarated no doubt by the
promise of rain, had crawled over the book and they had left their
slimy, glistening traces upon it.
Those small tracks remained on the book for a long time, preserved,
doubtless, by the paper cover that I put over them. They had the power
to recall a thousand things to me, thanks to that peculiarity of my mind
that associates the most dissimilar and incongruous images if only once,
for a single favorable moment, they have been accidentally joined.
And therefore the little, shining, zig-zag marks on the cover of Duruy
always brought to my mind Rameau's gay dance that I played on the shrill
old piano, only to have it drowned by the noise of the raging storm;
and the same little blotches also recall to me a vision that I had that
night (one, no doubt, born of an engraving by Teniers that hung on the
wall); there seemed to pass before my eyes little people belonging to a
bygone age who danced in the shade of a wood like that of Limoise; the
apparition awakened in me an appreciation of the pastoral gayety of that
time, a conception of the abandon and joyousness of the picnickers who
were dancing so merrily under the spreading branches of the oak trees.