Instructed by my grandmother, Blondeau had certainly prepared a long speech, but, carried away by haste after all his hesitations, he said to me in a brutal way:
“Well, your grandmother has sold the garden to the Demoiselles André to build a boarding-school in it.”
“What garden?”
“This one, ours, hers, yours!”
“You are telling an untruth!”
“Alas, I am not. Your grandmother did not dare to tell you until the contract was signed; she knew that you would beg her not to do it, and would prevent her; now the thing is irrevocable. Everything was finished this morning.”
“It is abominable. I wish to keep my trees, my temple of verdure, my brambles. I don’t want—I don’t want them to be taken from me! Blondeau, buy back my garden, you have money. We will make a house in it for our two selves; you, at least, cannot abandon me.”
And I threw myself in his arms, weeping.
It seemed to me that all my trees raised their branches heavenward, and that they wept with me under the sunshine.
What! my vines, with their bunches of muscat grapes, of which I was so fond; what! my immense apricot tree, which I had had measured and which was the largest one in Chauny, and which people came to see, with its five yards of breadth and ten yards of height; what! my box, which I had cut myself into balls and borders; was all this to be pulled up, cut, destroyed?