Fate is strong, but the will of man is stronger.
CHAPTER XL THE SPIRIT OF EARTH
All that winter from the passing of the investing army to the time when the siege guns began to shake earth and sky with their ceaseless roar and from then to the spring, we remained at the Pavilion, Joubert and I, unhindered, almost unvisited by the enemy. The Château drew them off. We had left the doors open to prevent them from being broken in; perhaps it was for this reason that so little mischief was done by the troops that quartered themselves there.
The coincidence of Winter and War, the leafless trees, the eternal roaring of Paris like a tiger at bay, the darkness and death in my heart, all these are in my life away back there, forming a picture or rather a dark mirror, reflecting the forms of Despair, Apathy and Ruin, just as the dark water of the moat reflects the fern fronds of the bank and the dark green plumage of those pine-trees.
Nothing could ever come right in the world again. The gloomy skies, shaken winter long by the cannon said that, and the woods, leafless and sad and sombre, where the squirrels and the hundred other wood creatures seemed banished for ever with the birds. So the winter passed, till one day—I had not been in the woods for a week—one day, following a path near the round pond I came across a troop of ghosts; violets growing right before me on the path side; and to the left amidst the trees, gem-like blue, and dim amidst the brown last autumn leaves—violets. Led by a few days' warmth a million violets had invaded the old forest, grouped themselves amidst the trees and along the paths, heedless of Death or the Prussians.
Even as I looked a breath of wind bent the tree branches like a warm hand, showing a patch of blue sky above and casting a ray of sunshine on the blue flowers below. The Drums of War, the trampling of armies at grip with one another, proclamations, treaties, the pageantry of victory, the sorrows of defeat, all in a moment were banished before that touch of spring and the vision of these lovely and immortal flowers.
Since then I have seen them growing amidst the ruins of Mycenae, in Vallombrosa, at the tomb of Virgil; poets, lovers, warriors, and kings, wherever sun may light or spring may touch their tombs, call to us again through the blue violets of spring, but never have these flowers of God brought the past to man so freshly, so strangely or with such poignancy as they brought it to me there, growing absolutely in the footsteps of Ruin, yet unruined and with not a dewdrop brushed from their leaves.
Ah, yes, there are times when the commonest man becomes a poet, as on that day when dreaming of the death of a woman and the dragon of war, I found spring hiding in the forest of Sénart just like some enchanting ghost of long ago, half-child, half-woman, and answering to my unspoken question, "War, Death, I have not seen them—I do not know whom you mean; they passed, mayhap, when I was asleep. Monsieur, do you not admire my violets?"