Page 223 - les-miserables

of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. ‘You al-
ways have a queer look about you,’ said Favourite to her.
Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples
are a profound appeal to life and nature, and make a caress
and light spring forth from everything. There was once a
fairy who created the fields and forests expressly for those in
love,—in that eternal hedge-school of lovers, which is forev-
er beginning anew, and which will last as long as there are
hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among
thinkers. The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and
the peer, the limb of the law, the courtiers and townspeo-
ple, as they used to say in olden times, all are subjects of
this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there is in the air the
brilliance of an apotheosis—what a transfiguration effected
by love! Notaries’ clerks are gods. And the little cries, the
pursuits through the grass, the waists embraced on the fly,
those jargons which are melodies, those adorations which
burst forth in the manner of pronouncing a syllable, those
cherries torn from one mouth by another,—all this blazes
forth and takes its place among the celestial glories. Beau-
tiful women waste themselves sweetly. They think that this
will never come to an end. Philosophers, poets, painters,
observe these ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so
greatly are they dazzled by it. The departure for Cythera!
exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter of plebeians, con-
templates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the
azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love
idyls, and d’Urfe mingles druids with them.
After breakfast the four couples went to what was then

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