CHAPTER XXXIX.
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.
