CHAPTER V
IN a quarter of an hour there grew all round about the park such an immense quantity of trees, large and small, with thorns and briars interlaced,-that neither man nor beast could pass; so that only the tops of the castle towers could be seen, and these only from a long way off.{*} Once, twice, thrice, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety, and a hundred times did Urania close the circle of Time: the Sleeping Beauty and her Court, with Boulingrin beside the Duchess on the bench in the antechamber, still slept on.
* Contes de Perrault, pp. 87-88.
Whether one regard Time as a mode of the unique substance, whether it be defined as one of the forms of the conscious ego, or an abstract phase of the immediate externality, or whether one regard it purely as a law, a relation resulting from the progression of Reality, we can affirm that one hundred years is a certain space of time.
CHAPTER VI
EVERY one knows the end of the enchantment, and how, after a hundred terrestrial cycles, a prince favoured by the fairies penetrated the enchanted wood, and reached the bed where slept the Princess. He was a little German princeling, with a pretty moustache, and rounded hips. As soon as she woke up, she fell, or rather rose so much in love, that she followed him to his little principality in such a hurry that she never said a word to the people of her household, who had slept with her for a hundred years.
Her first lady-in-waiting was quite touched thereby, and exclaimed with admiration: “I recognize the blood of my kings.” Boulingrin woke up beside the Duchess de Cicogne at the same time as the Princess and all her household. As he rubbed his eyes, his mistress said: “Boulingrin, you have been asleep.” “Not at all, dear lady, not at all.” He spoke in good faith. Having slept without dreaming for a hundred years, he did not know that he had been asleep.