CHAPTER III--FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS

  The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had becomeextraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted togaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its freshand verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowedhis thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars ofthat ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to twogreen and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment ofundecipherable 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 onthe wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grasseverywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner ofland. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothingin this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent overtowards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch hadinclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of thatwhich expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent overtowards 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 deepand close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under thewell-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feetsquare, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that isto 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 Floréal34 this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within itsfour walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered inthe rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths ofcosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling inits veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumblingsteps 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, andit was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling aboutthere in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure,a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what thetwittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the evening, a dreamyvapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, acalm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating perfume of thehoneysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every part of it, like anexquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers andthe wagtails were audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt thesacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice theleaves, by night the leaves protect the wings.

  In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, andallowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branchesand dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails werevisible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, thistiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old gatehad 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 pacesaway, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputiesnot far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the RueSaint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vaindid the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other'scourse at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passedover it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness,forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore tothis privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, greatcrimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles,uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depthsof the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certainindescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcertsthe petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughlywhere 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 forceand majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

  Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profoundand penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolutesatisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the causeor to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomableecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.Everything toils at everything.

  Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profitsthe rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of thehawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate thecourse of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is notdetermined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocalebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, thereverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanchesof creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, thelittle is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming visionfor the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and things;in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despisesthe other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear awayterrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it isdoing; 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 withthe peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level thebirth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescopeends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger fieldof vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is anant-hill of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts ofsubstance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply witheach other, to such a point that the material and the moral world arebrought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetuallyreturning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal lifegoes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisiblemystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits aplanet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force and ofthought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all, exceptthat geometrical point, the _I_; bringing everything back to thesoul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, fromsummit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching theflight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, whoknows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of thecomet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the dropof water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor ofwhich is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.