CHAPTER III

FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS


The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had
become extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years
ago halted to gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which
it hid in its fresh and verdant depths. More than one dreamer
of that epoch often allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate
indiscreetly between the bars of that ancient, padlocked gate,
twisted, tottering, fastened to two green and moss-covered pillars,
and oddly crowned with a pediment of undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting
on the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was
enough grass everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure,
and nature had returned. Weeds abounded, which was a great piece
of luck for a poor corner of land. The festival of gilliflowers
was something splendid. Nothing in this garden obstructed the
sacred effort of things towards life; venerable growth reigned
there among them. The trees had bent over towards the nettles,
the plant had sprung upward, the branch had inclined, that which crawls
on the earth had gone in search of that which expands in the air,
that which floats on the wind had bent over towards that which trails
in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres, clusters, tendrils,
shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed, married, confounded
themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and close embrace,
had celebrated and accomplished there, under the well-pleased
eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet square,
the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket,
that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled
as a city, quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral,
fragrant like a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within
its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination,
quivered in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks
in the breaths of cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April
rising and boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its
enormous wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth,
on the defaced statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion,
and even on the pavement of the deserted street, flowers like stars,
dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes. At midday,
a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and it was a divine
spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about there
in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure,
a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the
twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the evening,
a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud
of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating
perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every
part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals
of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed among
the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees;
by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect
the wings.


[34] From April 19 to May 20.


In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering,
and allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn,
this tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation,
solitude, liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and
the rusty old gate had the air of saying: "This garden belongs to me."

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on
every side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes
a couple of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand,
the Chamber of Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de
Bourgogne and of the Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain,
in the vicinity, in vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red
omnibuses cross each other's course at the neighboring cross-roads;
the Rue Plumet was the desert; and the death of the former proprietors,
the revolution which had passed over it, the crumbling away of
ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment
and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to this privileged spot ferns,
mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great crimped plants,
with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and
rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths of the earth
and to reappear between those four walls a certain indescribable
and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts the petty
arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in
the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with
as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no
absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe
the cause or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into
those unfathomable ecstasies caused by these decompositions
of force terminating in unity. Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate
the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds
is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the
reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being,
and the avalanches of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance;
the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced
in necessity; alarming vision for the mind. There are marvellous
relations between beings and things; in that inexhaustible whole,
from the sun to the grub, nothing despises the other; all have
need of each other. The light does not bear away terrestrial
perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing;
the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.
All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.
Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor
and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on
one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two
possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould
is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.
The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between
the things of the intelligence and the facts of substance.
Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other,
to such a point that the material and the moral world are brought
eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually
returning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits
a planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force
and of thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,
except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to
the soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity,
from summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism,
attaching the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth,
subordinating, who knows? Were it only by the identity of the law,
the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the whirling
of the infusoria in the drop of water. A machine made of mind.
Enormous gearing, the prime motor of which is the gnat, and whose
final wheel is the zodiac.