Just outside Dinant, near the famous Roche à Bayard, the legendary glory of the fair and smiling little township, the Germans occupied the right bank of the Meuse and were beginning to build a bridge of boats. The French, hidden in the bushes and the windings of the left bank, were firing on the engineers. Their fire was not very well-sustained; and the Germans, without the least justification, drew the conclusion that it was due to francs-tireurs, who, for that matter, throughout this Belgian campaign, never existed except in their imagination. At that moment, eighty hostages, taken from among the inhabitants of Dinant, were collected and kept in sight at the foot of the rock. The German officer sent one of them, M. Bourdon, a clerk attached to the law-courts, to the left bank, to inform the enemy that, if the firing continued, all the hostages would be instantly shot. M. Bourdon crossed the Meuse, fulfilled his mission and pluckily returned to reconstitute himself a prisoner. He assured the officer that he had convinced himself that there were no francs-tireurs and that only French soldiers of the regular army were taking part in the defence of the other bank. A few more bullets fell; and the officer caused the eighty hostages to be shot, beginning, that he might be punished as he deserved for his heroic faithfulness to his pledged word, with the poor clerk, his wife, his daughter and his two sons, one of whom was a mere child of fifteen.
WASTED BEAUTIES
VII
WASTED BEAUTIES
1
UNDER the grey skies and the disheartening rains of this autumnal July, I think of the light which I have left behind me. I have left it down there, on the now empty shores of the Mediterranean, and I ask myself in vain why I parted from it. Yet I was one of the last to tear myself away. All the others leave in the early days of April, recalled by legendary memories of the deceitful spring-tides of the north, nor do they realize that they are losing a great happiness.
It is good, it is wise to escape, amid the blue of sea and sky, the icy months of our winters, dismal as punishment; but, although in the south these months are warmer and above all more luminous than ours, they do not quite make up to us for the darkness and the frost of our native climes. The brightest and warmest hours, in spite of all, retain an after-taste of cloud and snow; they are beautiful, but timid; swiftly and fearfully they hasten towards the night. Now man, who is born of the sun, like all things, has need of his hereditary portion of primitive heat and all-pervading light. He has within him numberless deep-seated cells which retain the memory of the resplendent days of the prime and become unhappy when they cannot reap their harvest of rays. Man can live in the gloom, but at long last he loses the smile and the confidence that are so essential. Because of our twilit summers it becomes indispensable to restore the balance between darkness and light and sometimes to drive away, by superb excesses of sunshine, the cold and the dark that invade our very souls.
2
It reigns at a few hours’ distance from us, the incomparable steady sun which we no longer see. Those who leave before mid-June do not know what happens when they are gone. Lo and behold, the real actors in this wonderful fairyland spring up on every side as though they had been awaiting the departure of intruding and mocking witnesses. During the winter, in the presence of the official visitors, they have played but a tempered prologue, a little colourless, a little slow, a little timid and restrained. But now of a sudden the great lyrical acts blaze forth upon the intoxicated earth.
The heavens open their vistas to the uttermost limits of the blue, to the supreme heights where the glory and rapture of God are outspread; and all the flowers rend the gardens, the rocks and the heaths, to uplift themselves and leap towards the gulf of gladness which draws them into space. The camomiles have gone mad; for six weeks they hold outstretched, to invisible lovers, their great round clusters like shields of glowing snow. The scarlet, tumultuous mantle of the Bougainvilleas blinds the houses whose dazzled windows blink amid the flames. The yellow roses cover the hills with a saffron-coloured cloak; the pink roses, of the lovely, innocent pink of maiden blushes, flood the valleys, as though the divine well-springs of the dawn, which elaborate the ideal flesh of women and angels, had overflowed the earth. Others climb the trees, scale pillars, columns, house-fronts, porches, leap up and fall, rise again and multiply, jostle one another, lie one on top of the other, forming so many bunches of effervescing delight, so many silent swarms of impassioned petals. And the innumerable, diverse and imperious scents that flow through this ocean of mirth, like rivers which do not mingle, rivers whose source we recognize at every breath! Here is the cold, green torrent of the rose-geranium, the trickle of clove-carnations, the bright, limpid stream of lavender, the resinous eddy of the pine-barren and the wide, still, luscious lake, of an all but dizzy sweetness, of the orange-blossom, which drowns the country-side in the vast, unmeasured fragrance of the azure heavens, recognized at last.