int-Leons
standing just outside and above the village of Saint-Leons, where the
author was born in 1823. Cf. "The Life of the Fly": chapters 6 and
7.--Translator's Note.) with the four turrets that have now become
dovecotes. A steep path takes you up to this open space. From my house
on, it is more like a precipice than a slope. Gardens buttressed by
walls are staged in terraces on the sides of the funnel-shaped valley.
Ours is the highest; it is also the smallest.

There are no trees. Even a solitary apple-tree would crowd it. There
is a patch of cabbages, with a border of sorrel, a patch of turnips and
another of lettuces. That is all we have in the way of garden-stuff;
there is no room for more. Against the upper supporting-wall, facing due
south, is a vine-arbour which, at intervals, when the sun is generous,
provides half a basketful of white muscatel grapes. These are a luxury
of our own, greatly envied by the neighbours, for the vine is unknown
outside this corner, the warmest in the village.

A hedge of currant-bushes, the only safeguard against a terrible fall,
forms a parapet above the next terrace. When our parents' watchful eyes
are off us, we lie flat on our stomachs, my brother and I, and look into
the abyss at the foot of the wall bulging under the thrust of the land.
It is the garden of monsieur le notaire.

There are beds with box-borders in that garden; there are pear-trees
reputed to give pears, real pears, more or less good to eat when
they have ripened on the straw all through the late autumn. In our
imagination, it is a spot of perpetual delight, a paradise, but a
paradise seen the wrong way up: instead of contemplating it from below,
we gaze at it from above. How happy they must be with so much space and
all those pears!

We look at the hives, around which the hovering Bees make a sort of
russet smoke. They stand under the shelter of a great hazel. The tree
has sprung up all of itself in a fissure of the wall, almost on the
level of our currant-bushes. While it spreads its mighty branches over
the notary's hives, its roots, at least, are on our land. It belongs to
us. The trouble is to gather the nuts.

I creep along astride the strong branches projecting horizontally into
space. If I slip or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the
midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip and the support does not break.
With the bent switch which my brother hands me, I bring the finest
clusters wit