CHAPTER XVIII.
May! The grass ascends, ascends from everywhere like a sumptuous carpet, like silky velvet, emanating spontaneously from the earth.
In order to sprinkle this region of the Basques, which remains humid and green all summer like a sort of warmer Brittany, the errant vapors on the Bay of Biscay assemble all in this depth of gulf, stop at the Pyrenean summits and melt into rain. Long showers fall, which are somewhat deceptive, but after which the soil smells of new flowers and hay.
In the fields, along the roads, the grasses quickly thicken; all the ledges of the paths are as if padded by the magnificent thickness of the bent grass; everywhere is a profusion of gigantic Easter daisies, of buttercups with tall stems, and of very large, pink mallows like those of Algeria.
And, in the long, tepid twilights, pale iris or blue ashes in color, every night the bells of the month of Mary resound for a long time in the air, under the mass of the clouds hooked to the flanks of the mountains.
During the month of May, with the little group of black nuns, with discreet babble, with puerile and lifeless laughter, Gracieuse, at all hours, went to church. Hastening their steps under the frequent showers, they went together through the graveyard, full of roses; together, always together, the little clandestine betrothed, in light colored gowns, and the nuns, with long, mourning veils; during the day they brought bouquets of white flowers, daisies and sheafs of tall lilies; at night they came to sing, in the nave still more sonorous than in the day-time, the softly joyful canticles of the Virgin Mary:
“Ave, Queen of the Angels! Star of the Sea, ave!—”
Oh, the whiteness of the lilies lighted by the tapers, their white petals and their yellow pollen in gold dust! Oh, their fragrance in the gardens or in the church, during the twilights of spring!
And as soon as Gracieuse entered there, at night, in the dying ring of the bells—leaving the pale half-light of the graveyard full of roses for the starry night of the wax tapers which reigned already in the church, quitting the odor of hay and of roses for that of incense and of the tall, cut lilies, passing from the lukewarm and living air outside to that heavy and sepulchral cold that centuries amass in old sanctuaries—a particular calm came at once to her mind, a pacifying of all her desires, a renunciation of all her terrestrial joys. Then, when she had knelt, when the first canticles had taken their flight under the vault, infinitely sonorous, little by little she fell into an ecstasy, a state of dreaming, a visionary state which confused, white apparitions traversed: whiteness, whiteness everywhere; lilies, thousands of sheafs of lilies, and white wings, shivers of white wings of angels—