Madame Guibert politely racked her memory.
“My son Étienne brought us home some rose-cuttings—they found a good soil at Le Maupas. These are their flowers. They are lovely, but they have no scent.”
“Certainly, they have no scent. But I don’t mind about that. And where had your son Étienne come from?”
“From Tonkin, Monsieur, from the Bay of Along, which produces flowers and fruit in abundance.”
“Ah! a Chinese rose! That is it. I thought it must be. And you don’t know its name, of course. Nobody knows the names of flowers in France.”
Madame Guibert excused herself smilingly, and the flower-maniac continued:
“They teach music to young girls, so that they may bore their fathers to death, and later their husbands, with sonatas. But they neglect to teach them botany. And in botany, Madame, should be recognised the crown of the earth, the grace of the home, the peace of the human spirit! I find a happy philosophy in it. To repair this gap in instruction I am making a catalogue of all the names of roses. We must know where to stop. Nature is too vast for us. But these names are, for the most part, deplorably vulgar!”
“Really, Monsieur,” said the poor lady at random, thinking of something else and yet humoring his fancy.
“Deplorable, I repeat. The prettiest are women’s names. They do not remind us of the complicated and delightful art of the garden, nor of the diversity of the vegetable kingdom with its thousand forms and colors, nor of our various shades of feeling—though to these it would have been in good taste to have made suitable allusion. They are inanimate names, like those of geography or chemistry.”
“I don’t understand anything about it,” admitted Madame Guibert, “but I love flowers.”