I believe that that spring was the most radiant and the most ravishingly
happy one of my childhood, in contrast no doubt to the terrible winter
spent under the rigorous care of the Great Ape.
Oh! the end of May, the high grass and then the June mowing! In what a
glory of golden light I see it all again!
I took evening walks with my father and sister as I had done during
my earlier years; they now came to meet me at the close of school,
at half-past four, and we set out immediately for the fields. Our
preference that spring was for a certain meadow abloom with pink
amourettes, and I always brought home great bouquets of these flowers.
In that same meadow a migratory and ephemeral species of moth, black
and pink (of the same pink as the amourettes) had hatched out, and they
slept poised on the long stalks of the grass, or flew away as lightly as
the flowers shed their petals when we walked through the hay. . . . And
all of these things appear to me again as I saw them in the exquisite,
limpid June atmosphere. . . . During the afternoon classes, the thought
of the sun-dappled meadows made me more restless than did even the mild
air and the spring odors that came in through the open windows.
I cherish particularly the remembrance of an evening in which my mother
had promised, as a special favor, to join us in our walk to the fields
of pink amourettes. That afternoon I had been more inattentive than
usual, and the Great Ape had threatened to keep me in, and all during
my lessons I firmly believed that I was to be punished. This keeping
in after school, which shut us away from the beautiful June day an
hour longer, was always a cruel torture. But to-day my heart felt
particularly heavy as I reflected that mamma would, doubtless, come at
the appointed hour and expect me,--and with some bitterness I thought
that the springtime was so very short, that the hay would soon need to
be cut, and that perhaps there would not be, the whole summer long, such
another glorious evening as this one.
As soon as school was over I anxiously consulted the fatal list in
the hands of the monitor; my name was not there! The Big Black Ape had
forgotten me, or had been merciful!
Oh! with what joy I rushed away to join mamma who had kept her promise
and who, with my father and sister, smilingly awaited me. . . . The air
that I breathed in was more delicious than ever, it was exquisitely soft
and balmy, and the atmosphere had a tropical resplendence.
When I recall that time, when I think of those meadows all abloom with
amourettes, and of those pink moths, there is mingled, to my regret, a
sort of indefinable pain whose intensity I cannot understand, an anguish
I always feel when I find myself in the presence of things that impress
and charm me with their undercurrent of mystery.