The white peacocks were spreading their dreams of tails below the terrace, between the crouching sphynxes that years and years of moss and ivy and rose-vines had grown over.
There had been church bells ringing to the voices of the garden, its birds and bees and grasshoppers. And I had not known.
Against the rampart walls I could see, between the trees, the town roofs gathered close, rust-red ancient tiles and thatch that time and weathers had made beautiful, and crooked chimney-pots and blue smoke rising straight and high in the still, blue air.
I could hear the little sounds of the village, together with the garden sounds and the bells.
I could smell hearth fires and fresh-baked bread, together with the new-cut grass and heliotrope and roses.
Every sound had been part of the stillness; all the lines and colours of things belonged together in that soft harmony which is so especially of France. I had thought, how it was France! And I had not known.
I had gone to Mass in the little ancient, dusky church of the village. I had gone down across the parterres, and along the avenue of limes, through the summer woods that were so happy and alive, out at the little green gate in the rampart walls, and down the street of big square old cobbles, between the nestling houses.
And in the church there had been incense and candles, and the white caps of old women, and the wriggling of the children in their Sunday clothes.
When I came back, there were the papers arrived from Paris. And nothing again was ever, ever, to be the same.
That night, not knowing why, I wanted to write down for my own memory notes of just those little things that seem so small, and that went all together to the making of a mood we can no more find to turn to.