There was a wound in the bark of the pear-bearing orange tree that formed an eye which was slowly shedding tears.
I was becoming quite nervous. Would one have believed it? I was assailed by a ridiculous anguish as I looked at the oak-tree (which had had an operation) because I fancied the cherries looked like drops of blood...! Flop! flop! Two ripe ones fell at my feet like the first drops of a thunder-storm.
I was no longer possessed of the calm necessary for reading the labels. They merely told me a few dates—and the fact that Lerne had covered them with Franco-German terms which had originally been illegible, and were rendered more so by erasures.
With my ears on the alert, and with my brow in my hands, I had to take a moment’s respite in order to gather my wits together, and then I opened the door of the right wing.
A little nave, as it were, stretched out before me. Its glass vault filtered the daylight and attenuated it to a bluish and refreshingly cool half-light. My steps rang out on the flagstones.
In this chamber there gleamed three aquariums, three tanks of glass, so pure that the water seemed to be standing of itself in three geometrical blocks.
The aquariums on the two sides of the hall held marine plants which did not seem to differ much one from the other. However, the rotunda had taught me with what method Lerne classified everything, and I could not believe that he had separated into two tanks things absolutely identical. So I watched the sea-weeds attentively.
Their tufts, on both sides of the place, formed the same submarine landscape. On the right, as on the left, arborescences of every color had fixed their rigid and bifurcated stems on the rocks; the sandy bottom was sprinkled with stars like edelweiss, and here and there sprung up sheaves of chalky rods, at the end of each of which a sort of fleshy chrysanthemum unfolded itself like a yellow or a violet flower. I cannot describe the host of other corollæ; they often resembled oily calices of wax or of gelatine; most of them showed an indefinable color in a vague outline, and sometimes they had no edges and were mere nuances in the midst of the water.
Bubbles escaped in thousands from an inside tap, and their tumultuous pearls raced madly along the foliage before they rose to burst on the surface. One would have thought, seeing them, that that aquatic garden had always to be drenched with air.
Recalling my schoolboy memories I grasped that the two sets of flowering things—differing merely in detail—were exclusively composed of polypi, those ambiguous creatures, such as coral or sponge, which the naturalist interpolates between vegetables and animals.