) He told Gilberte that she might play one game; he could wait for
a quarter of an hour; and, sitting down, just like anyone else, on an iron
chair, paid for his ticket with that hand which Philippe VII had so often
held in his own, while we began our game upon the lawn, scattering the
pigeons, whose beautiful, iridescent bodies (shaped like hearts and,
surely, the lilacs of the feathered kingdom) took refuge as in so many
sanctuaries, one on the great basin of stone, on which its beak, as it
disappeared below the rim, conferred the part, assigned the purpose of
offering to the bird in abundance the fruit or grain at which it appeared
to be pecking, another on the head of the statue, which it seemed to crown
with one of those enamelled objects whose polychrome varies in certain
classical works the monotony of the stone, and with an attribute which,
when the goddess bears it, entitles her to a particular epithet and makes
of her, as a different Christian name makes of a mortal, a fresh divinity.
On one of these sunny days which had not realised my hopes, I had not the
courage to conceal my disappointment from Gilberte.
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