end of the world, Madame Francois used
to say. The load of vegetable leaves now had to be discharged. Claude
and Florent would not hear of the journeyman gardener, who was planting
lettuces, leaving his work, but armed themselves with pitchforks and
proceeded to toss the leaves into the manure pit. This occupation
afforded them much amusement. Claude had quite a liking for manure,
since it symbolises the world and its life. The strippings and parings
of the vegetables, the scourings of the markets, the refuse that fell
from that colossal table, remained full of life, and returned to the
spot where the vegetables had previously sprouted, to warm and nourish
fresh generations of cabbages, turnips, and carrots. They rose again
in fertile crops, and once more went to spread themselves out upon the
market square. Paris rotted everything, and returned everything to the
soil, which never wearied of repairing the ravages of death.

"Ah!" exclaimed Claude, as he plied his fork for the last time, "here's
a cabbage-stalk that I'm sure I recognise. It has grown up at least half
a score of times in that corner yonder by the apricot tree."

This remark made Florent laugh. But he soon became grave again, and
strolled slowly through the kitchen garden, while Claude made a sketch
of the stable, and Madame Francois got breakfast ready. The kitchen
garden was a long strip of ground, divided in the middle by a narrow
path; it rose slightly, and at the top end, on raising the head, you
could perceive the low barracks of Mont Valerien. Green hedges separated
it from other plots of land, and these lofty walls of hawthorn fringed
the horizon with a curtain of greenery in such wise that of all the
surrounding country Mont Valerien alone seemed to rise inquisitively
on tip-toe in order to peer into Madame Francois's close. Great
peacefulness came from the countryside which could not be seen. Along
the kitchen garden, between the four hedges, the May sun shone with
a languid heat, a silence disturbed only by the buzzing of insects,
a somnolence suggestive of painless parturition. Every now and then a
faint cracking sound, a soft sigh, made one fancy that one could hear
the vegetables sprout into being. The patches of spinach and sorrel,
the borders of radishes, carrots, and turnips, the beds of potatoes
and cabbages, spread out in even regularity, displaying their dark
leaf-mould between their tufts of greenery. Farther away, the trenched
lettuc