‘I’ve been meeting you in the same theatre now for a long time, I always find you there. For whom do you go?’ For whom?…It had never occurred to me that one could go there for another. However, I mentioned a name.

‘Well,’ said my friend, indulgently, ‘there’s the happy man who has just taken her home and who, faithful to the laws of our club, will probably not see her again until to-morrow morning.’

Without showing too much interest, I turned and saw a young man of the world faultlessly attired, with a pale, expectant face and eyes full of a gentle sadness. He was sitting at a whist-table, where he threw down his gold and lost it heedlessly.

‘What does he matter to me?’ I said, ‘or any other? There had to be someone, and he seems worthy of her choice.’

‘And you?’

‘Me? I’m following a likeness, nothing more.’

I went out through the reading-room and instinctively picked up a newspaper; I think I wanted to see how the market was going, for after the wreck of my fortune there remained a considerable sum in foreign shares, and a rumour was afloat that the property was at last going to amount to something. A ministry had just fallen and the quotation was very high; I was rich once more.

Only one thought arose out of this turn in my affairs: the woman I had loved for so long was mine for the asking; my ideal was within reach. Surely I was deluding myself with a mocking misprint? But all the newspapers contained the same quotation, and my winnings rose up before me like the golden statue of Moloch. What would that young man say now, I wondered, if I were to take possession of the woman he had forsaken?…I trembled at the thought and then my pride asserted itself. No! at my age one does not put an end to love with money; I will not be a seducer. After all, the times have changed, and how do I know she is mercenary?

My eyes ran vaguely over the newspaper I was still holding, and I read these two lines: ‘Fête du Bouquet Provincial. Tomorrow the archers of Senlis will present the bouquet to those of Loisy’. These simple words awakened in me an entirely new train of thought; memories of the province forgotton long ago, distant echoes of the care-free festivals of youth. The horn and the drum sounded far away in the hamlets and in the forests; maidens were weaving garlands, and they sang as they sorted out the bouquets tied with ribbons. A heavy wagon drawn by oxen passed by to receive these gifts, and we, the children of the country, took our places in the procession, knights by virtue of our bows and arrows, unaware then that we were but repeating through the years a druidic festival that would outlive monarchies and new religions.

II. Adrienne

I went to bed but found no rest; and as I lay there between sleeping and waking, memories of my childhood thronged about me. In this state, where the mind still resists the fantastic combinations of dreams, the important happenings of a long period of one’s life often crowd themselves into a few moments.

The picture rose up in my mind of a château of the time of Henry IV, with its pointed slate roofs, its reddish front and yellowed stonework, and its wide enclosure edged by elms and lindens whose foliage scattered golden shafts of sunlight upon the smooth green surface. Maidens danced in a ring on the grass, and they sang old melodies, handed down to them by their mothers, with an accent so unaffectedly pure that one seemed to be actually living in that old Valois country where the heart of France beat for more than a thousand years.