Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep? For whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth of poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?
And the Abbé did not understand it at all.
But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching trees wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by side.
The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck; and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. Suddenly they animated the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to his question, they moved toward the priest.
Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed as though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body—all the glowing romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing itself into his mind.
And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in order to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”
He withdrew before this pair who went ever arm in arm. True, it was his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he visibly encompass it with glory such as this?
And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated into a temple wherein he had no right to enter.
ALPHONSE DAUDET, MAN AND ARTIST
When the gods parceled out their gifts, to Alphonse Daudet fell a rich endowment: a poet’s imaginative nature, yet withal a clear vision for realities which is often denied the disciple of poesy; a sure dramatic instinct, too, with a contrasting power of repression which checked his slightest tendency toward the florid and the melodramatic; and, coloring all, a native sense of humor so tenderly sympathetic that it prevented his satire from biting with that acid sharpness of which his wit was capable. An all-round, well-poised literary genius was he, efficient in many fields, and preëminent in more than one.