How
often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free to live
as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched out on his
back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the
current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly above him,
shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.
We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge. In the holiday sky
a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed by the
burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with an
anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards we
would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on
the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint, but solid still
and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted
not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but,
broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous
strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.
Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon a
house of the kind called 'pleasure houses,' isolated and lost, seeing
nothing of the world, save the river which bathed its feet.
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