es those who think that
nature is dead at that season admit that nature never dies but only
sleeps. The man who lives to be seventy or eighty years of age has his
nights of ten or twelve hours, and often complains that the length
of his nights adds to the shortness of his days. Nature, which has an
everlasting existence; trees, which live a thousand years; have sleeping
periods of four or five months, which are winters for us but only nights
for them. The poets, in their envious verse, sing the immortality of
nature, which dies each autumn and revives each spring. The poets are
mistaken; nature does not die each autumn, she only falls asleep; she
is not resuscitated, she awakens. The day when our globe really dies,
it will be dead indeed. Then it will roll into space or fall into the
abysses of chaos, inert, mute, solitary, without trees, without flowers,
without verdure, without poets.

But on this beautiful day of the 23d of February, 1800, sleeping nature
dreamed of spring; a brilliant, almost joyous sun made the grass in the
ditches on either side of the road sparkle with those deceptive pearls
of the hoarfrost which vanish at a touch, and rejoice the heart of a
tiller of the earth when he sees them glittering at the points of his
wheat as it pushes bravely up through the soil. All the windows of the
diligence were lowered, to give entrance to this earliest smile of the
Divine, as though all hearts were saying: "Welcome back, traveller
long lost in the clouds of the West, or beneath the heaving billows of
Ocean!"

Suddenly, about an hour after leaving Chatillon, the diligence stopped
at a bend of the river without any apparent cause. Four horsemen quietly
approached, walking their horses, and one of them, a little in advance
of the others, made a sign with his hand to the postilion, ordering him
to draw up. The postilion obeyed.

"Oh, mamma!" cried Edouard, standing up and leaning out of the window
in spite of Madame de Montrevel's protestations; "oh, mamma, what fine
horses! But why do these gentlemen wear masks? This isn't carnival."

Madame de Montrevel was dreaming. A woman always dreams a little; young,
of the future; old, of the past. She started from her revery, put her
head out of the window, and gave a little cry.

Edouard turned around hastily.

"What ails you, mother?" he asked.

Madame de Montrevel turned pale and took him in her arms without a word.
Cries of terror were heard in the interior.