king them into new sections,
lopped and trimmed the trees, united different trunks in marriage, made
nosegays of their branches. It would skilfully draw towards it a pair of
trees; making deft use of the sharp chisel of light and shade, it would
cut away from each of them half of its trunk and branches, and, weaving
together the two halves that remained, would make of them either a
single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding light, or a single
luminous phantom whose artificial, quivering contour was encompassed
in a network of inky shadows. When a ray of sunshine gilded the highest
branches, they seemed, soaked and still dripping with a sparkling
moisture, to have emerged alone from the liquid, emerald-green
atmosphere in which the whole grove was plunged as though beneath the
sea. For the trees continued to live by their own vitality, and when
they had no longer any leaves, that vitality gleamed more brightly still
from the nap of green velvet that carpeted their trunks, or in the white
enamel of the globes of mistletoe that were scattered all the way up to
the topmost branches of the poplars, rounded as are the sun and moon in
Michelangelo's 'Creation.' But, forced for so many years now, by a sort
of grafting process, to share the life of feminine humanity, they called
to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walking,
brightly coloured, whom they sheltered with their branches as she
passed beneath them, and obliged to acknowledge, as they themselves
acknowledged, the power of the season; they recalled to me the happy
days when I was young and had faith, when I would hasten eagerly to the
spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate for a few
moments beneath the unconscious, accommodating boughs. But the beauty
for which the firs and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne made me long,
more disquieting in that respect than the chestnuts and lilacs of
Trianon which I was going to see, was not fixed somewhere outside myself
in the relics of an historical period, in works of art, in a little
temple of love at whose door was piled an oblation of autumn leaves
ribbed with gold. I reached the shore of the lake; I walked on as far as
the pigeon-shooting ground. The idea of perfection which I had within me
I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon
the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon
the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the crue