Back of Luz is a bare, rounded eminence, called Saint-Pierre, crowned by a fragment of gray ruin, and commanding a view of the whole valley. When the sky has been overcast, I have spent here entire hours without a moment of weariness: beneath its cloudy Curtain the air is moderately warm. Sudden patches of sunlight stripe the Gave, or illumine the harvests hung midway on the mountain slope. The swallows, with shrill cries, wheel high in the creeping vapors; the sound of the Gave comes up, softened by distance into a harmony that is almost aerial. The wind breathes, and dies away; a troop of little flowers flutters at the passage of its wing; the buttercups are drawn up in line; frail little pinks bury in the herbage their rosy-purple stars; slender-stemmed grasses nod over the broad slaty patches; the air is filled with the fragrance of thyme. Are they not happy, these solitary plants, watered by the dew, fanned by the breezes?
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This height is a desert; no one comes to tread them down; they grow after their own sweet will, in clefts of the rock, by families, useless and free, flooded by the loveliest sunlight. And man, the slave of necessity, begs and calculates under penalty of his life! Three children, all in rags, came upon the scene: “What are you looking for here?”
“Butterflies.”
“What for?”
“To sell.”
The youngest had a sort of tumor on his forehead. “Please, sir, a sou for the little one who is ill.”