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lighting up for us, and for us alone, with a secret and lan-
guid flame invisible by the great lady upon his other side, an
enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.
Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me
to dine with him on this same Sunday evening. ‘Come and
bear your aged friend company,’ he had said to me. ‘Like the
nosegay which a traveller sends us from some land to which
we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from the
far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers
of spring among which I also used to wander, many years
ago. Come with the primrose, with the canon’s beard, with
the gold-cup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies
made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that
flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter daisy, come
with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to em-
balm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt’s
garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil.
Come with the glorious silken raiment of the lily, appar-
el fit for Solomon, and with the many-coloured enamel of
the pansies, but come, above all, with the spring breeze, still
cooled by the last frosts of wirier, wafting apart, for the two
butterflies’ sake, that have waited outside all morning, the
closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose.’
The question was raised at home whether, all things con-
sidered, I ought still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin.
But my grandmother refused to believe that he could have
been impolite.
‘You admit yourself that he appears at church there, quite
simply dressed, and all that; he hardly looks like a man of

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