So I broke the news to Anastasia. “Little Thing, I’ve borrowed a baby for you this afternoon. Solonge is coming with us to the gardens.”
(Really, if I had given her a new hat she could not have been more enchanted.)
“Oh, that will be lovely! Then will I have my two childrens with me. You don’t know how I am glad.”
So we gaily descended the timeworn stairs, and found the youngster eagerly awaiting us. In her navy blue coat and hat her wealth of long hair looked fairer and silkier than ever. For a child of four and a half she was very tall and graceful. Then we bade the mother au revoir, and with the youngster chattering excitedly as she held the hand of Anastasia, and me puffing at the cheap briar I had bought in the place of the ill-fated meerschaum, we started out.
“I suppose if it hadn’t been for Solonge,” I observed, “Frosine would have thrown up the sponge long ago. How awful to be alone day after day, sewing against time, so to speak; and that for all one’s life!”
“Oh, no. There is many girl like that in Paris. They work till they die. They are brought up in the couvent. That make them very serious.”
Anastasia had certainly the deepest faith in her religion.
After its long winter relâche the glorious old garden was awakening to the symphony of Spring. The soft breeze that stirred the opening buds came to us laden with fragrance, arousing that so exquisite feeling of sweet confused memory that only the Spring-birth can evoke. The basin of the Fontaine de Médicis was stained a delicate green by peeping leaves, and a flock of fat sparrows with fluttering feathers and joyous cries were making much ado. We sat down on one of the stone benches, because the pennies for the chairs might buy many needful things.
That dear, dear garden of the Luxembourg, what, I wonder, is the secret of its charm? Is it that it is haunted by the sentiment and romance of ages dead and forgotten? Beautiful it is, yet other gardens are also beautiful, and—oh, how different! Surely it should be sacred, sacred to children, artists and lovers. There, under the green and laughing leaf, where statues glimmer in marble or gloom in bronze, and the fountain throws to the tender sky its exquisite aigrette of gold—there the children play, the artists dream, and the lovers exchange sweet kisses. Oh, Mimi and Musette, where the bust of Murger lies buried in the verdure, listening to the protestations of your Eugene and Marcel!—do you not dream that in this self-same spot your mothers in their hours listened to the voice of love, nay, even their mothers in their hours. So over succeeding generations will the old garden cast its spell, and under the branches of the old trees lovers in days to come will whisper their vows. Yea, I think it is haunted, that dear, dear garden of the Luxembourg.
Solonge, whom I had decided to call “The Môme,” had a top which she kept going with a little whip. To start it she would wind the lash of the whip around its point, then standing it upright in the soft ground, give it a sharp jerk. But after a little she tired of this, and began to ask questions about fairies. Never have I seen a child so imaginative. Her world is peopled with fairies, with whom she holds constant communion. There are tree fairies, water fairies, fairies that live in the ground, fairies that lurk in the flowers—she can tell you all about them. Her faith in them is touching, and brutal would he be who tried to shatter it.