Another day.
. . . Between Champrosay and the Meillottes, in the middle of a park which skirts the Seine, there stands a mansion built in the style of Louis XV. of the period of the Marquis d’Etiolles and Madame de Pompadour. Two thick straight rows of trees slope down to the river, showing, in summer-time, at the end of the arch of green foliage, a mirror of blue water blended with a blue sky. All the darkness of the old avenues seems to escape through these two vistas of light. At the entrance near the gates, a wide moat surrounding the lawns, a circle of moss-covered lime-trees and curbstones grazed by carriage-wheels, all combine to show the antiquity of this quiet old place. A fancy took me, and the other day I went in there.
By a winding path I reached the front of the steps. The doors were open, the shutters broken. On the ground-floor, in the large drawing-rooms, where the walls were all covered with white carved panels, not a single piece of furniture was left. Nothing but straw, and on the façade, between the stone carving of the balconies, were fresh marks and scratches, showing how the furniture had been thrown out through the windows. The billiard-room only was untouched. The Prussian officers are like our own, they are very fond of playing billiards. Only these gentlemen had amused themselves by making a target of a large mirror, and with its scratches, its chipped fragments, its small round holes looking black in the light, the mirror seemed like a frozen lake cut and furrowed by sharp skates. Inside, the wind rushed through the large windows battered down by bayonets and butt-ends of rifles, scattering and sweeping in the dead leaves on to the floors. Outside, it dashed under the green-leafed aisle, rocking a forgotten boat on the pond, full of broken twigs and golden-coloured willow-leaves.
I walked to the end of the avenues. There, at the end of the terrace, is a summer-house of red bricks overlooking the river; it is buried in the trees, and the Prussians have probably not seen it. The door, however, is ajar. I found a little sitting-room inside, hung with a flowery chintz, which seemed the continuation of the Virginian jasmine climbing through the latticed shutters; a piano, some scattered music, a book forgotten on a bamboo stool in front of the view over the Seine, and in the mysterious light of the closed shutters, the elegant and refined portrait of a woman looked out of a golden frame. Wife or maiden, who can tell? Dark, tall, with an ingenuous look, an enigmatic smile, and eyes the colour of thought—those Parisian eyes that change with each passing emotion. It is the first face I have seen for two months, and is so living, so proud, so youthful in its seriousness! The impression this picture has caused me is singular . . . I dreamt of the summer afternoons that she had spent there, seeking the solitude and freshness of this corner of the park. The book, the music, spoke of a refined nature; and there lingered in the twilight of this little nook a perfume of the past summer, of the vanished woman, and of a tender grace left only in the smile of the portrait.
