Beneath the verandah are hung two little Æolian harps, which at the least ruffle of the breeze running through their blades of grass, emit a gentle tinkling sound, like the harmonious murmur of a brook; outside, to the very furthest limits of the distance, the cicalas continue their great and everlasting concert; over our heads, on the black roof, is heard passing like a witch's sabbath, the raging battle to the death of cats, rats and owls.
Presently, when in the early dawn, a fresher breeze, mounting upwards from the sea and the deep harbor, reaches us, Chrysanthème will slyly get up and shut the panels I have opened.
Before that, however, she will have risen at least three times to smoke: having yawned like a cat, stretched herself, twisted in every direction her little amber arms, and her graceful little hands, she sits up resolutely, with all the waking groans and half words of a child, pretty and fascinating enough: then she emerges from
the gauze tent, fills her little pipe, and breathes a few puffs of the bitter and unpleasant mixture.
Then comes pan, pan, pan, pan, against the box to shake out the ashes. In the resounding sonority of the night it makes quite a terrible noise, which wakes Madame Prune. This is fatal. Madame Prune is at once seized also with a longing to smoke which may not be denied; then, to the noise from above, comes an answering pan, pan, pan, pan, from below, exactly like it, exasperating and inevitable as an echo.
More cheerful are the noises of the morning: the cocks crowing, the wooden panels all round the neighborhood sliding back upon their rollers; or the strange cry of some little fruit-hawker, patrolling our lofty suburb in the early dawn. And the grasshoppers absolutely seem to chirp more loudly, to celebrate the return of the sunlight.
Above all, rises to our ears from below the sound of Madame Prune's long prayers, ascending through the floor, monotonous as the song of a somnambulist, regular and soothing as the splash of a fountain. It lasts three-quarters of
an hour at least; it drones along, a rapid flow of words in a high nasal key; from time to time, when the inattentive Spirits are not listening, it is accompanied by a clapping of dry palms, or by harsh sounds from a kind of wooden clapper made of two discs of mandragora root; it is an uninterrupted stream of prayer; its flow never ceases, and the quavering continues without stopping, like the bleating of an old nanny-goat in delirium.