This similarity, which imparted to the
statue itself a kindliness that I had not looked to find in it, was
corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from the fields, come, like
ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose presence there--as when
the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up beside leaves carved in
stone--seemed intended by fate to allow us, by confronting it with its
type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of
art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a promised or an accursed land,
Roussainville, within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussainville
was now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised, like a
village in the Old Testament, by all the innumerable spears and arrows of
the storm, which beat down obliquely upon the dwellings of its
inhabitants, or else had already received the forgiveness of the Almighty,
Who had restored to it the light of His sun, which fell upon it in rays of
uneven length, like the rays of a monstrance upon an altar.
Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go
home and to remain shut up indoors.
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