Page 2050 - les-miserables

slipped into the garden and there they remained. Closed
gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is supposed to
continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the inspectors,
moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the
outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden,
and had not seen the two delinquents.
It had rained the night before, and even a little in the
morning. But in June, showers do not count for much. An
hour after a storm, it can hardly be seen that the beautiful
blonde day has wept. The earth, in summer, is as quickly
dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of the solstice,
the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It takes
everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes it-
self with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was
thirsty. A shower is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is in-
stantly drunk up. In the morning everything was dripping,
in the afternoon everything is powdered over.
Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed
by the rain and wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm
freshness. The gardens and meadows, having water at their
roots, and sun in their flowers, become perfuming-pans of
incense, and smoke with all their odors at once. Everything
smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently intoxicated.
The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man
to have patience.
There are beings who demand nothing further; mor-
tals, who, having the azure of heaven, say: ‘It is enough!’
dreamers absorbed in the wonderful, dipping into the idol-
atry of nature, indifferent to good and evil, contemplators of

2050 Les Miserables