nd finally filled up the entire
landscape, cube-shaped like houses, flat like flagstones, propping up,
overhanging, and became intermingled with each other, as if they were
the ruins, unrecognisable and monstrous, of some vanished city. But the
wild chaos they exhibited made one rather dream of volcanoes, of
deluges, of great unknown cataclysms. Frederick said they had been there
since the beginning of the world, and would remain so till the end.
Rosanette turned aside her head, declaring that this would drive her out
of her mind, and went off to collect sweet heather. The little violet
blossoms, heaped up near one another, formed unequal plates, and the
soil, which was giving way underneath, placed soft dark fringes on the
sand spangled with mica.

One day they reached a point half-way up a hill, where the soil was full
of sand. Its surface, untrodden till now, was streaked so as to resemble
symmetrical waves. Here and there, like promontories on the dry bed of
an ocean, rose up rocks with the vague outlines of animals, tortoises
thrusting forward their heads, crawling seals, hippopotami, and bears.
Not a soul around them. Not a single sound. The shingle glowed under the
dazzling rays of the sun, and all at once in this vibration of light the
specimens of the brute creation that met their gaze began to move about.
They returned home quickly, flying from the dizziness that had seized
hold of them, almost dismayed.

The gravity of the forest exercised an influence over them, and hours
passed in silence, during which, allowing themselves to yield to the
lulling effects of springs, they remained as it were sunk in the torpor
of a calm intoxication. With his arm around her waist, he listened to
her talking while the birds were warbling, noticed with the same glance
the black grapes on her bonnet and the juniper-berries, the draperies of
her veil, and the spiral forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent
towards her the freshness of her skin mingled with the strong perfume of
the woods. They found amusement in everything. They showed one another,
as a curiosity, gossamer threads of the Virgin hanging from bushes,
holes full of water in the middle of stones, a squirrel on the branches,
the way in which two butterflies kept flying after them; or else, at
twenty paces from them, under the trees, a hind strode on peacefully,
with an air of nobility and gentleness, its doe walking by its side.

Rosanette would have liked to