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There has been much talk in our quarter of a Memorial Festival.
I am not anxious to be present and I watch Marie set off. Then I feel myself impelled to go there, as if it were a duty.
I cross the bridge. I stop at the corner of the Old Road, on the edge of the fields. Two steps away there is the cemetery, which is hardly growing, since nearly all those who die now are not anywhere.
I lift my eyes and take in the whole spectacle together. The hill which rises in front of me is full of people. It trembles like a swarm of bees. Up above, on the avenue of trimmed limetrees, it is crowned by the sunshine and by the red platform, which scintillates with the richness of dresses and uniforms and musical instruments.
Then there is a red barrier. On this side of that barrier, lower down, the public swarms and rustles.
I recognize the great picture of the past. I remember this ceremony, spacious as a season, which has been regularly staged here so many times in the course of my childhood and youth, and with almost the same rites and forms. It was like this last year, and the other years, and a century ago and centuries since.
Near me an old peasant in sabots is planted. Rags, shapeless and colorless—the color of time—cover the eternal man of the fields. He is what he always was. He blinks, leaning on a stick; he holds his cap in his hand because what he sees is so like a church service. His legs are trembling; he wonders if he ought to be kneeling.
And I, I feel myself diminished, cut back, returned through the cycles of time to the little that I am.
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