The night before our departure, we had climbed to the garden of the Pincio. After sunset, which one watches from the terrace as if it were a play, we walked on in the direction of the Villa Borghese. On our right, a lawn sloped down to a small wood of pine trees, on the outskirts of which a group of seminary students, in their red robes, were walking up and down, reciting their breviary. A bareheaded young girl of the people ran past us. I noticed her erect carriage, her black hair, the beads of perspiration on her neck. Presently she lay down on the grass, drawing up her dress round her for a rug. A young man who had followed her approached her from behind. He had plucked several clusters from a border of flowering acacias, and began to throw them at her laughingly. She did not move. Then he came nearer, and, stooping, kissed her on the neck in the spot where I had seen the bead of perspiration. Even pleasure did not change her motionless attitude.
“Look,” I said to Raymonde, “is that not as beautiful as an antique marble?”
But she stood still, her ear strained, her arm a little raised.
“Listen,” she murmured.
Answering each other the bells of countless churches announced the Angelus. Their chimes came faintly up the slope to us, but she was familiar with several and recognised them. For the last time, religious Rome was speaking to her.
I was jealous of her diverted attention; that hour of peace, which the voices of the evening, the twilight, and the realisation of our love combined to make sacred, I spoiled by a wish to oppose my companion, to humiliate her, to bruise her.
I was tormented by restlessness and sensuality instead of yielding myself to the beneficent tranquillity which sprang naturally from her love.
* * *
When we returned from Italy, the springtime which we had left in full blossom in the Roman campagna, where the grain was already tall and ripening, had hardly begun to make our woods verdant again.
M. and Mme. Mairieux awaited us.