g him to the window, held him
there and forced him to look out and see.

'What a coward you are!' she exclaimed with her fine ringing laugh.

And waving one hand all round the landscape, she repeated with an air of
triumph, full of tender promise: 'The Paradou! The Paradou!'

Serge looked out upon it, speechless.

IV

A sea of verdure, in front, to right, to left, everywhere. A sea rolling
its surging billows of leaves as far as the horizon, unhindered by
house, or screen of wall, or dusty road. A desert, virgin, hallowed
sea, displaying its wild sweetness in the innocence of solitude. The
sun alone came thither, weltering in the meadows in a sheet of gold,
threading the paths with the frolicsome scamper of its beams, letting
its fine-spun, flaming locks droop through the trees, sipping from the
springs with amber lips that thrilled the water. Beneath that flaming
dust the vast garden ran riot like some delighted beast let loose at
the world's very end, far from everything and free from everything.
So prodigal was the luxuriance of foliage, so overflowing the tide of
herbage, that from end to end it all seemed hidden, flooded, submerged.
Nought could be seen but slopes of green, stems springing up like
fountains, billowy masses, woodland curtains closely drawn, mantles of
creepers trailing over the ground, and flights of giant boughs swooping
down upon every side.

Amidst that tremendous luxuriance of vegetation even lengthy scrutiny
could barely make out the bygone plan of the Paradou. In the foreground,
in a sort of immense amphitheatre, must have lain the flower garden,
whose fountains were now sunken and dry, its stone balustrades
shattered, its flight of steps all warped, and its statues overthrown,
patches of their whiteness gleaming amidst the dusky stretches of turf.
Farther back, behind the blue line of a sheet of water, stretched a maze
of fruit-trees; farther still rose towering woodland, its dusky, violet
depths streaked with bands of light. It was a forest which had regained
virginity, an endless stretch of tree-tops rising one above the other,
tinged with yellowish green and pale green and vivid green, according to
the variety of the species.

On the right, the forest scaled some hills, dotting them with little
clumps of pine-trees, and dying away in straggling brushwood, while a
huge barrier of barren rock, heaped together like the fallen wreckage of
a mountain, shut out all view beyond. Fla