And, with a rather silly yet kind air, she drew closer to George, leering at him with eyes sunk deep in their orbits, almost sightless.
She added:
"It's Jesus come back to earth. God bless you! May you live as long as there's bread and wine. May you become as great as the sun!"
And, with a joyous step, she passed on into the house, through the same door which all her twenty-two children had passed through on their way to baptism.
The old man said to George:
"My name is Colas di Cinzio; but, as my father's surname was Sciampagne, everybody calls me Colas di Sciampagne. Come and see the garden."
George followed the peasant.
"The crops are very promising this year."
The old man, walking in front, praised the plantations, and, as is common with persons who have grown old in the midst of nature, he made prognostications. The garden was luxuriant, and seemed to enclose in its circle all the gifts of abundance. The orange-trees shed such waves of perfume that, at moments, the atmosphere acquired a sweet and powerful savor, like that of a generous wine. The other fruit-trees were no longer in flower, but their innumerable fruits hung from nourishing branches, rocked by the breath of heaven.
George thought: "This, perhaps, is what the superior life would be: a limitless liberty; a noble and fruitful solitude which would envelop me with its warmest emanations; to journey on amidst the vegetal creation as one would amongst a multitude of intelligences; to wrest from it the occult thought and to divine the mute sentiment which reigns beneath the externals; to successively render my being comfortable with each of these beings, and to successively substitute for my weakened and oblique soul each of these simple and strong souls; to contemplate nature with such a continuity of attention that I should succeed in reproducing, in my own person, the harmonious palpitation of all creatures; finally, by a laborious and ideal metamorphosis, identify myself with the robust tree whose roots absorb the invisible subterranean ferments, and whose summit imitates, by its agitation, the voice of the sea. Would not that be truly a superior life?" At the sight of the spring-time exuberance that transfigured the surrounding places, he permitted himself to be dominated by a sort of drunken panic. But the fatal habit of contradiction cut short this transport, brought him back to his old ideas, opposed reality to dreams. "We have no contact whatever with nature. We have only the imperfect perception of exterior forms. It is impossible for man to enter into communion with things. Man has certainly the power to inject into things all his own substance; but he never receives anything in return. The sea will never speak to him in an intelligible language, the earth will never reveal to him its secret. Man may feel all his blood circulate in the fibres of the tree, but the tree will never give him one drop of its vital sap."