Page 2054 - les-miserables

left over from the autumn, chased each other merrily, and
seemed to be playing tricks on each other.
This abundance of light had something indescribably
reassuring about it. Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one
was conscious, beneath creation, of the enormous size of
the source; in all these breaths permeated with love, in this
interchange of reverberations and reflections, in this mar-
vellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of
liquid gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible;
and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one
caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire of stars.
Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks
to the rain, there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of
blossoms had just been bathed; every sort of velvet, sat-
in, gold and varnish, which springs from the earth in the
form of flowers, was irreproachable. This magnificence was
cleanly. The grand silence of happy nature filled the gar-
den. A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand
sorts of music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms,
the flutterings of the breeze. All the harmony of the season
was complete in one gracious whole; the entrances and ex-
its of spring took place in proper order; the lilacs ended; the
jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects in
advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butter-
flies fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies
of May. The plantain trees were getting their new skins. The
breeze hollowed out undulations in the magnificent enor-
mity of the chestnut-trees. It was splendid. A veteran from
the neighboring barracks, who was gazing through the

2054 Les Miserables