whatever it might be, upon which I was trying to concentrate them,
whirling in front of me like those brown spots that sometimes, whatever
we may be looking at, will seem to be dancing or swimming before our
eyes. And on that morning, not hearing the splash of the rain as on the
previous days, seeing the smile of fine weather at the corners of my
drawn curtains, as from the corners of closed lips may escape the secret
of their happiness, I had felt that I could actually see those yellow
leaves, with the light shining through them, in their supreme beauty;
and being no more able to restrain myself from going to look at the
trees than, in my childhood's days, when the wind howled in the chimney,
I had been able to resist the longing to visit the sea, I had risen and
left the house to go to Trianon, passing through the Bois de Boulogne.
It was the hour and the season in which the Bois seems, perhaps, most
multiform, not only because it is then most divided, but because it
is divided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the
horizon is large, here and there against the background of a dark
and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer
foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a
picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist
who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering their
cloister, in full daylight, for the casual exercise of the human figures
that would be added to the picture later on.

Farther off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone,
small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resistance, was tossing
in the breeze an ugly mane of red. Elsewhere, again, might be seen
the first awakening of this Maytime of the leaves, and those of an
ampelopsis, a smiling miracle, like a red hawthorn flowering in winter,
had that very morning all 'come out,' so to speak, in blossom. And the
Bois had the temporary, unfinished, artificial look of a nursery garden
or a park in which, either for some botanic purpose or in preparation
for a festival, there have been embedded among the trees of commoner
growth, which have not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, a
few rare specimens, with fantastic foliage, which seem to be clearing
all round themselves an empty space, making room, giving air, diffusing
light. Thus it was the time of year at which the Bois de Boulogne
displays more separate characteri