From beyond the myrtle fence and gilded railings which severed the park from the pleasaunce, enough could be seen, enough heard, of the brilliant revelry within to tell of its extravagance, and its elegance, in the radiance that streamed from all the illumined avenues.
He stood and looked long; hearing the faint echo of the music, seeing the effulgence of the light through the dark myrtle barrier.
A very old crippled peasant, searching in the grass for truffles, with a little dog, stole timidly up and looked too.
"How can it feel, to live like that?" he asked, in a wistful, tremulous voice.
Tricotrin did not hear: his hand was grasped on one of the gilded rails with a nervous force as from bodily pain.
The old truffle-gatherer, with his little white dog panting at his feet, crossed himself as he peered through the myrtle screen.
"God!" he muttered; "how strange it seems that people are there who never once knew what it was to want bread, and to find it nowhere, though the lands all teemed with harvest! They never feel hungry, or cold, or hot, or tired, or thirsty: they never feel their bones ache, and their throat parch, and their entrails gnaw! These people ought not to get to heaven—they have it on earth!"
Tricotrin heard at last: he turned his head and looked down on the old man's careworn, hollow face.
"'Verily they have their reward,' you mean? Nay, that is a cruel religion, which would excruciate hereafter those who enjoy now. Judge them not; in their laurel crowns there is full often twisted a serpent. The hunger of the body is bad indeed, but the hunger of the mind is worse perhaps; and from that they suffer, because from every fulfilled desire springs the pain of a fresh satiety."
The truffle-hunter, wise in his peasant-fashion, gazed wistfully up at the face above him, half comprehending the answer.