It is Easter week...

   It is Easter week, and like a beloved opera for whose sweet musical influence we are consumed with a desire to yield ourselves up, everyone decides to go to the countryside as quickly as possible. Besides, the production is particularly brilliant, we must hurry to get the benefit of it. Because it is only in recent days that the cherry trees, the apple trees, the pear trees have shown themselves off in all the splendour of their flimsy robes of white or pink. And the fragile lilacs who prolong their stay every year by a few weeks so as to appear beside the cherry trees before whose almost fairy-like beauty they smilingly keep themselves in the background, just as women will often admire other women - the fragile lilacs are still there, graciously inclining their violet or swan-white heads. And even though their beauty is certainly less dazzling, perhaps you prefer it to that of the cherry trees, and perhaps you find a unique charm in their perfume. On every reach of the old chestnut trees, the leaves - joyous guests of spring who stay on late to revel in the lovely season and of which some, more resistant than others to the redoubtable September wind, prolong their stay, alone exposing themselves valiantly to the inclemencies of autumn on the deserted branches - the leaves are already fully out. On days when the sun is oppressive in the still air, they remain immobile for hours, one beside the other, in magnificent repose. Other times when the breeze gets up, suspended from the indefatigable and gentle branch which supports them so high above the ground and lets them bend as they will, they frolic with the passing air, each following the other and the whole colony seems to be stirred in a pleasant agreement. Birds live here amongst them, but like a more independent guest who has the faculty to come and go as he pleases provided he returns in the evening when all are asleep in the gigantic and silent tree. We hear nothing but the transitory flutter of a leaf which turns around without being woken by the noise of the passing wind, or the confused murmur or the mysterious agitation of the branches as they dream. Charming too is that emancipated boarder of the tree, the bird. Energetic and gentle he entertains the leaves with his ingenuity and his talent, playing with them without hurting them, like a frolicsome and bestowing brother with his astonished little sisters. During the long days he extracts his exuberant life from the somewhat monotonous immobility of well-behaved prisoners. He sings and all the leaves listen, and at any moment he breaks into conversation with another bird in another tree. They chatter like this from one tree to another, but the leaves, like well-brought up individuals, do not interfere in the conversation. They remain silent one beside the other, from time to time rocking in subtle movements. Up until their arrival the tree was as dead as an empty house with its shutters closed. Now through the open windows we see that the house has come back to life. In the same way suddenly five hundred leaves have planted their marvellous green awnings on the reinhabited tree. Now the storm can come. We feel that youth, life, life which will be resplendent before a new sun, is there. The sky grows cloudy, it is raining. But the tree has not gathered in its magnificent green foliage, perhaps more green still in this dull, lightless atmosphere of a rainy day, green to the very edges of its leaves, seeming to blaze inside with a light, with a life, with a summer held within themselves, sensible of this rich, solid green, which laughs at the rain, and which promises, when the cloud breaks, to re-emerge and begin afresh its excursion, sun in the blue sky, sunbeams on the roads, around the shadows. This grey daylight is almost more beautiful than the golden and blue daylight, because of the presence of all this rich luxury of the tree in leaf. The bird never stops singing throughout, and his song, less expected on this rainy day, less innocent, more confused, like those flowers that emit their perfume in a yet more insinuating way as if by stealth, than in the broad daylight of the sun which scorches them in proportion. In the midst of such happiness is a melancholy, a vague anguish which is a greater pleasure and holds something more intoxicating than happiness. Often, when the rain is late in coming, the birds do not stop repeating the same cry for a moment, draining it to the last, like a breviary repeated over and over again, from a creature which offers itself, which would like to play; from time to time in a suffocating phrase we sense the inflation of their throats being oppressed by vague troubles. With others their cry is so piercing that we cannot tell whether or not something is causing them pain at that moment. The days are already hot. After lunch a light walk is sufficient. If there is a little air we might try to reach the little wood, in spite of the heat, which is more than a league distant, so that it is already in a different district. When you were small you could never go that far. And you would dream about the lives of men from this other region who sometimes came on a Sunday to your little town, beneath large hats, caps, of strange appearance, who lived in welcoming places in the promised coolness of little woods full of springs and violets that you had never seen. In order to reach their first houses it would take more than two hours. And when you set off, the afternoon being less hot already, if you reached their houses, for them it would be evening already, and it would seem like a country which was more beautiful, more mysterious and more cool. I remember once, when I was still a small child, being taken like this to see the source of the Loir. It was a sort of rectangular washing place in which thousands of little fish would concentrate like a quivering black crystallization around the tiniest crumb of bread thrown to them. Around the washing place the solid, hard road was more the shade of water than the Loir. Yet here was the source of the Loir, invisible from the entire length of the road which rejoined, two leagues further on as it approached Illiers, a large and graceful river. And I could never understand how this little washing place, at the bottom of which one could see it rising up and cultivating itself above the little drops of water, like those that can be seen in aquariums where the water is constantly renewed, could be the source of the Loir. But the absence of any correspondence between the Loir and this little washing place, around the edge of which was always hung laundry I was forbidden to touch, only made this place more mysterious to me and gave it even more of an incomprehensible character which came to be attached to the origin of natural life. Also this water which welled up in separate drops at the bottom of the washing place full of tadpoles, was for me the source of the Loir in a quite abstract fashion, almost as sacred as certain figures could be of the river gods to the Romans. And I vaguely imagined that the women who always came here to wash their linen had chosen this place in preference to any other on account of its illustrious and sacred character.

 


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