บทที่ บทที่ 236 · FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS

The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become

extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to

gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its

fresh and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often

allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the

bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to

two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment

of undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,

several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on

the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass

everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.

Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of

land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing in

this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;

venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over

towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had

inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that

which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over

towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,

clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,

married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and

close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the

well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet

square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.

This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is

to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,

quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a

bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floréal34 this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within its

four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered in

the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of

cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in its

veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,

sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling

steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,

flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,

perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there,

and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling

about there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of

verdure, a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and

what the twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the

evening, a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a

shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the

intoxicating perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out

from every part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last

appeals of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed

among the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the

trees; by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect

the wings.

In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and

allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches

and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were

visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,

under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this

tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,

liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old

gate had the air of saying: “This garden belongs to me.”

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every

side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple

of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of

Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the

Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in

vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other’s

course at the neighboring crossroads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;

and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had

passed over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence,

forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed

to restore to this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow,

tall weeds, great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green

cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring

forth from the depths of the earth and to reappear between those four

walls a certain indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature,

which disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds

herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant

as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian

garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the

New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and

penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute

satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause

or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable

ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.

Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits the

rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the

hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the

course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not

determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb

and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the

reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches

of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little,

the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming

vision for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and

things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing

despises the other; all have need of each other. The light does not

bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing

what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the

sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of

the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a

meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places

on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two

possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a

pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars. The same

promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between the things

of the intelligence and the facts of substance. Elements and principles

mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other, to such a point that

the material and the moral world are brought eventually to the same

clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually returning upon itself. In the

vast cosmic exchanges the universal life goes and comes in unknown

quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible mystery of effluvia,

employing everything, not losing a single dream, not a single slumber,

sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a planet there,

oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of thought an

element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all, except that

geometrical point, the _I_; bringing everything back to the soul-atom;

expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from summit to

base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the flight of an

insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows? Were it

only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the comet in the

firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop of water. A

machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of which is the

gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.