not bring Gilberte to the Champs-Elysees.

And so, if the heavens were doubtful, from early morning I would not
cease to interrogate them, observing all the omens. If I saw the lady
opposite, just inside her window, putting on her hat, I would say to
myself: "That lady is going out; it must, therefore, be weather in which
one can go out. Why should not Gilberte do the same as that lady?" But
the day grew dark. My mother said that it might clear again, that one
burst of sunshine would be enough, but that more probably it would rain;
and if it rained, of what use would it be to go to the Champs-Elysees?
And so, from breakfast-time, my anxious eyes never left the uncertain,
clouded sky. It remained dark: Outside the window, the balcony was grey.
Suddenly, on its sullen stone, I did not indeed see a less negative
colour, but I felt as it were an effort towards a less negative colour,
the pulsation of a hesitating ray that struggled to discharge its light.
A moment later the balcony was as pale and luminous as a standing water
at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had
come to rest on it. A breath of wind dispersed them; the stone grew
dark again, but, like tamed creatures, they returned; they began,
imperceptibly, to grow lighter, and by one of those continuous
crescendos, such as, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single
note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through all the
intermediate stages, I saw it attain to that fixed, unalterable gold of
fine days, on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the
balustrade were outlined in black like a capricious vegetation, with a
fineness in the delineation of their smallest details which seemed to
indicate a deliberate application, an artist's satisfaction, and with so
much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their sombre
and happy mass that in truth those large and leafy shadows which lay
reflected on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges
of happiness and peace of mind.

Brief, fading ivy, climbing, fugitive flora, the most colourless, the
most depressing, to many minds, of all that creep on walls or decorate
windows; to me the dearest of them all, from the day when it appeared
upon our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte,
who was perhaps already in the Champs-Elysees, and as soon as I arrived
there would greet me with: "Let's begin at once. You are on my