stics, assembles more distinct elements
in a composite whole than at any other. It was also the time of day.
In places where the trees still kept their leaves, they seemed to have
undergone an alteration of their substance from the point at which they
were touched by the sun's light, still, at this hour in the morning,
almost horizontal, as it would be again, a few hours later, at the
moment when, just as dusk began, it would flame up like a lamp, project
afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and set ablaze the few
topmost boughs of a tree that would itself remain unchanged, a sombre
incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest. At one spot the
light grew solid as a brick wall, and like a piece of yellow Persian
masonry, patterned in blue, daubed coarsely upon the sky the leaves of
the chestnuts; at another, it cut them off from the sky towards which
they stretched out their curling, golden fingers. Half-way up the trunk
of a tree draped with wild vine, the light had grafted and brought to
blossom, too dazzling to be clearly distinguished, an enormous posy,
of red flowers apparently, perhaps of a new variety of carnation. The
different parts of the Bois, so easily confounded in summer in the
density and monotony of their universal green, were now clearly divided.
A patch of brightness indicated the approach to almost every one of
them, or else a splendid mass of foliage stood out before it like an
oriflamme. I could make out, as on a coloured map, Armenonville, the
Pre Catalan, Madrid, the Race Course and the shore of the lake. Here and
there would appear some meaningless erection, a sham grotto, a mill, for
which the trees made room by drawing away from it, or which was borne
upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn. I could feel that the
Bois was not really a wood, that it existed for a purpose alien to the
life of its trees; my sense of exaltation was due not only to admiration
of the autumn tints but to a bodily desire. Ample source of a joy which
the heart feels at first without being conscious of its cause, without
understanding that it results from no external impulse! Thus I gazed
at the trees with an unsatisfied longing which went beyond them and,
without my knowledge, directed itself towards that masterpiece of
beautiful strolling women which the trees enframed for a few hours every
day. I walked towards the Allee des Acacias. I passed through forest
groves in which the morning light, brea