Love, my sweet love,
Have I hurt you?”
And the wind carried the dying words to the young man, still standing motionless at the foot of the oak trees.
“Just a little, scarcely that,
But I shall die of it!
A kiss from your lips
Would heal me quite!”
Jean’s eyes swept over the scene before him—the trees with their new leaves, the meadows with their waving grasses, the girl full of the wine of youth. He breathed in the scent of the earth and the morning woods. And in his native air he tasted the love of life.
It was only since he had learnt how transitory it is that he had enjoyed the beauty of nature in its fulness. Young people do not understand the value of existence as they run heedlessly after pleasure, frivolity, distraction and all that hastens, while it hides, the flight of time. It is danger, passion, love’s melancholy, the sight of death; it is the deep sorrows which bring them to a sudden halt before life’s unmasked face, as when at the bottom of a garden path one suddenly comes upon a cold marble statue under the branches. How can he who would ignore the night feel with the same ecstasy as we the glory of the daylight that must go and of the shapes that the darkness must swallow?
Jean had reached the zenith of his youth, and was wiser. Another and a deeper sky, another country, sterile and bare, had developed and perfected his understanding. Above all, new and tragic emotions had struck at his heart with a terrible force, like that of the sculptor’s chisel which causes the useless chips to fly from the stone which is to grow into a statue. Inspired by gratitude for the lessons which he had learnt, he connected his full, passionate appreciation of this spring morning with that crimson dawn on which he had seen his friend die. In the death of the leader after victory, in the pierced forehead behind which the brain so lately lived, in the heart now cold which had been the home of love, in the face of all that strength and courage, shattered like a tree in its vigor; in all these things was manifest the frailty of human life, by contrast with which the light of day shines the brighter. With Marcel’s face on the ground before him—beautiful in its serene, grave stillness, in its calm, touching repose, never to be forgotten amid the surrounding scene—he had felt alike the wish to live fully and without fear and the desire to deny the everlasting presence of death.