The feast, as I believe I have already said, lasted three days, and fell at Whitsuntide.
For three days the park was filled with pleasant sounds and happy murmurs, which began at early morning and did not die away until far on in the night. For three days the poor forgot their misery, and, much more extraordinary still, the rich forgot their riches. The whole town was gathered together in the park as one great family, and, as this family invited all its branches, relations, friends, acquaintances, the population increased fourfold. People came from la Ferté-Milon, from Crespy, from Soissons, from Château-Thierry, from Compiègne, from Paris! Every place in the coaches was booked for fifteen days in advance: and all kinds of other means of transport were devised; horses, cabs, tilburys, postcarts arrived and jostled each other in the only two hotels of the district, the Dauphin and the Boule d'Or. For three days the little town was like a body over full of blood, whose heart was beating ten times as fast as it should. But on the Wednesday it began to part with its surplus, which gradually dwindled away during the following days, until everything little by little resumed its ordinary aspect again. The large woods, which had been disturbed for three days even in their thickest depths, recovered their silence and their solitude once more: the chestnuts again became inhabited by birds, which, flying in and out among their branches, scattered a snow of flowers. Finally, the sward, which had been trodden underfoot and despoiled of its flowers, sprang up again by degrees, under the sun's influence, and once more offered a second harvest of daisies and buttercups to the devastating hands of children.
Two strangers came to the pleasant feast of Whitsuntide, this particular year.
One was a niece of the Abbé Grégoire, named Laurence—I have forgotten her surname.
The other was a friend of hers. She made out that she was of Spanish extraction, and was called Vittoria.
The abbé had told me of her coming. One morning, he came into our house and quite frightened me.
"Come here, boy," he said to me.
And I went to him, not feeling very sure what he was going to do to me.
"Nearer," he said—"much nearer still; you know I am shortsighted ... there—that will do."
The poor abbé was really as blind as a mole.