again. When I
returned to Paris, two years later, the nursery had been destroyed. What
became of them, deprived of the dear garden of former days, with its
mazes, its odor of the past, and the graceful windings of its hedges?

Are they dead? Are they wandering among modern streets like hopeless
exiles? Are they dancing--grotesque spectres--a fantastic
minuet in the moonlight, amid the cypresses of a cemetery, along the
pathways bordered by graves?

Their memory haunts me, obsesses me, torments me, remains with me like a
wound. Why? I do not know.

No doubt you think that very absurd?

THE SON

The two old friends were walking in the garden in bloom, where spring was
bringing everything to life.

One was a senator, the other a member of the French Academy, both serious
men, full of very logical but solemn arguments, men of note and
reputation.

They talked first of politics, exchanging opinions; not on ideas, but on
men, personalities in this regard taking the predominance over ability.
Then they recalled some memories. Then they walked along in silence,
enervated by the warmth of the air.

A large bed of wallflowers breathed out a delicate sweetness. A mass of
flowers of all species and color flung their fragrance to the breeze,
while a cytisus covered with yellow clusters scattered its fine pollen
abroad, a golden cloud, with an odor of honey that bore its balmy seed
across space, similar to the sachet-powders of perfumers.

The senator stopped, breathed in the cloud of floating pollen, looked at
the fertile shrub, yellow as the sun, whose seed was floating in the air,
and said:

"When one considers that these imperceptible fragrant atoms will create
existences at a hundred leagues from here, will send a thrill through the
fibres and sap of female trees and produce beings with roots, growing
from a germ, just as we do, mortal like ourselves, and who will be
replaced by other beings of the same order, like ourselves again!"

And, standing in front of the brilliant cytisus, whose live pollen was
shaken off by each breath of air, the senator added:

"Ah, old fellow, if you had to keep count of all your children you would
be mightily embarrassed. Here is one who generates freely, and then lets
them go without a pang and troubles himself no more about them."

"We do the same, my friend," said the academician.

"Yes, I do not deny it; we let them go sometimes," resumed the senator,
"but we are aware