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FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS
The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century
had become extraordinary and charming.
The passers-by of forty years ago halted to gaze at it, without
a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its fresh and verdant
depths.
More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowed his thoughts
and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of that
ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two green
and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of
undecipherable arabesque.
There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting
on the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough
grass everywhere.
Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor
corner of land.
The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid.
Nothing in this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things
towards life; venerable growth reigned there among them.
The trees had bent over towards the nettles, the plant had
sprung upward, the branch had inclined, that which crawls on the
earth had gone in search of that which expands in the air, that
which floats on the wind had bent over towards that which trails
in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres, clusters, tendrils,
shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed, married, confounded
themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and close embrace,
had celebrated and accomplished there, under the well-pleased
eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet square,
the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket,
that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled
as a city, quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant
like a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.
In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate
and within its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination,
quivered in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks
in the breaths of cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April
rising and boiling in its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous
wonderful green locks, sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced
statues, on the crumbling steps of the pavilion, and even on the
pavement of the deserted street, flowers like stars, dew like
pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes.
At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there,
and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling
about there in flakes amid the shade.
There, in those gay shadows of verdure, a throng of innocent
voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the twittering forgot
to say the humming completed.
In the evening, a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and
enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered
it; the intoxicating perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus
poured out from every part of it, like an exquisite and subtle
poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were
audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt the sacred
intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice
the leaves, by night the leaves protect the wings.
[34] From April 19 to May 20.
In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering,
and allowed some glimpse of the house.
Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails
were visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in
any fashion, under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter,
summer, autumn, this tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy,
contemplation, solitude, liberty, the absence of man, the presence
of God; and the rusty old gate had the air of saying:
"This garden belongs to me."
It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there
on every side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes
a couple of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand,
the Chamber of Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue
de Bourgogne and of the Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously,
in vain, in the vicinity, in vain did the yellow, brown, white,
and red omnibuses cross each other's course at the neighboring
cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert; and the death of the
former proprietors, the revolution which had passed over it, the
crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, forty
years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to
this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds,
great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards,
beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from
the depths of the earth and to reappear between those four walls
a certain indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which
disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself
always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant
as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian
garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest
of the New World.
Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this.
Although no absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy,
either to circumscribe the cause or to limit the effect, the contemplator
falls into those unfathomable ecstasies caused by these decompositions
of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.
Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star
profits the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the
perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations.
Who, then, can calculate the course of a molecule?
How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined
by the fall of grains of sand?
Who knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great
and the infinitely little, the reverberations of causes in the
precipices of being, and the avalanches of creation?
The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the
little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming
vision for the mind.
There are marvellous relations between beings and things;
in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing
despises the other; all have need of each other.
The light does not bear away terrestrial perfumes into the
azure depths, without knowing what it is doing; the night distributes
stellar essences to the sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have
round their leg the thread of the infinite. Germination is complicated
with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow
cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm
and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope
begins.
Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision?
Choose.
A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill
of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,
exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts of
substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply
with each other, to such a point that the material and the moral
world are brought eventually to the same clearness.
The phenomenon is perpetually returning upon itself.
In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life goes and comes
in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible mystery
of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to
bits a planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light
a force and of thought an element, disseminated and invisible,
dissolving all, except that geometrical point, the I; bringing
everything back to the soul-atom; expanding everything in God,
entangling all activity, from summit to base, in the obscurity
of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the flight of an insect to the
movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows?
Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of
the comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in
the drop of water.
A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor
of which is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.
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