IS father, after all these years, was still wearing the blue stockings with gold clocks. Florian noted that first, because his father’s foot was gently prodding Florian into wakefulness, as Florian’s father sat there under the little tree from the East. Beyond the Duke’s smiling countenance, beyond the face which was at once the face of Michael and of Janicot, Florian could now see a criss-crossery of stripped boughs, each one of which was tipped with a small bud of green.
“Come, lazibones, but you will get your death of cold, sleeping here on the bare ground, at harvest-time.”
“At harvest-time—I have been dreaming—” Florian sat erect, rubbing at his eyes with a hand whose smallness he instantly noted with wonder. The ground, too, seemed surprisingly close to him, the grass blades looked bigger than was natural. He could feel sinking away from him such childish notions about God and wickedness, and about being a grown man, as the little boy—who was he, as he now recollected,—had blended in his callow dreaming: and Florian sat there blinking innocent and puzzled eyes. He was safe back again, he reflected, in the seventeenth century: Louis Quatorze was King once more: and all the virtues were again modish. And this really must be harvest-time, for the sleek country of Poictesme appeared inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a mellowing haze.
Florian said, “It was a very queer dream, monsieur my father—”
“A pleasant dream, however, I hope, my son. No other sort of dream is worth inducing by sleeping under what, they used to tell me, is a charmed tree, and by using for your pillow a book that at least is charming.”
And the Duke pointed to the book by Monsieur Perrault of the Academy, in which Florian had that very morning read with approving interest about the abominable Bluebeard and about the Cat with Boots and about the Sleeping Beauty and about Cendrillon and about a variety of other delightful persons.
But Florian just now was not for fairy tales, rather all his thoughts still clung to his queer dream. And the child said, frowning:
“It was pleasant enough. But it was puzzling. For there were beautiful ladies that nobody could stand living with, and a saint that was an out-and-out fraud, and”—Florian slightly hesitated,—“and a wicked man, as bad almost as Komorre the Cursed, that did everything he wanted to, without ever being exactly punished, or satisfied either—”
“Behold now,” Monsieur de Puysange lamented, “how appalling are the advances of this modern pessimism! My own child, at ten, advises me that beauty and holiness are delusions, and that not even in untrammeled wickedness is to be found contentment.”