"I command you—understand!—I command you to hurry off there."
She obeyed, but, grumbling, resolved soon to have done with her masters; they were so incomprehensible and fantastic.
Then, as in former days, they went to drink their coffee and brandy on the hillock.
The harvest was just over, and the stacks in the middle of the fields rose in dark heaps against the tender blue of a calm night. Nothing was astir about the farms. Even the crickets were no longer heard. The fields were all wrapped in sleep.
The pair digested while they inhaled the breeze which blew refreshingly against their cheeks.
Above, the sky was covered with stars; some shone in clusters, others in a row, or rather alone, at certain distances from each other. A zone of luminous dust, extending from north to south, bifurcated above their heads. Amid these splendours there were vast empty spaces, and the firmament seemed a sea of azure with archipelagoes and islets.
"What a quantity!" exclaimed Bouvard.
"We do not see all," replied Pécuchet. "Behind the Milky Way are the nebulæ, and behind the nebulæ, stars still; the most distant is separated from us by three millions of myriamètres."[7]
He had often looked into the telescope of the Place Vendôme, and he recalled the figures.
"The sun is a million times bigger than the earth; Sirius is twelve times the size of the sun; comets measure thirty-four millions of leagues."