There was a fountain, too, dripping melodiously under the trees; I heard the breathless humming of a spinning-wheel from one of the low houses of gray stone which enclosed the square, and a young girl singing, and the drone of bees in a bed of resida.
So this was Paradise! Truly the name did not seem amiss here, under the still vault of blue above; Paradise means peace to so many of us—surcease of care and sound and the brazen trample of nations—not the quiet of palace corridors or the tremendous silence of a cathedral, but the noiselessness of pleasant sounds, moving shadows of trees, wordless quietude, simplicity.
A young girl with a face like the Madonna stole across the square in her felt shoes.
“Can you tell me where the mayor lives?” I asked, looking down at her from my horse.
She raised her white-coiffed head with an innocent smile: “Eman’ barz ar sal o leina.”
“Don’t you speak French?” I asked, appalled.
“Ho! ia; oui, monsieur, s’il faut bien. The mayor is at breakfast in his kitchen yonder.”
“Thank you, my child.”
I turned my horse across the shady square to a stone house banked up with bed on bed of scarlet geraniums. The windows were open; a fat man with very small eyes sat inside eating an omelet.
He watched me dismount without apparent curiosity, and when I had tied my horse and walked in at the open door he looked at me over the rim of a glass of cider, and slowly finished his draught without blinking. Then he said, “Bonjour.”