It was the hour and the season in which the Bois
seems, perhaps, most multiform, not only because it is then most divided,
but because it is divided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts,
where the horizon is large, here and there against the background of a
dark and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer
foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a
picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist who
had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering their
cloister, in full daylight, for the casual exercise of the human figures
that would be added to the picture later on.
Farther off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone,
small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resistance, was tossing in the
breeze an ugly mane of red. Elsewhere, again, might be seen the first
awakening of this Maytime of the leaves, and those of an ampelopsis, a
smiling miracle, like a red hawthorn flowering in winter, had that very
morning all 'come out,' so to speak, in blossom. And the Bois had the
temporary, unfinished, artificial look of a nursery garden or a park in
which, either for some botanic purpose or in preparation for a festival,
there have been embedded among the trees of commoner growth, which have
not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, a few rare specimens,
with fantastic foliage, which seem to be clearing all round themselves an
empty space, making room, giving air, diffusing light.
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