It seemed to Louis de Richepin, upon entering the Bois de Boulogne, that he had descended into a luminous world floating soundlessly under green still seas. Here the sunlight entered only as a circumambient emerald light, and the aisles formed by the trees were caverns brimming with dim translucent water. It was a hushed world, unreal, profoundly motionless, where strange creatures might be expected to swim out with long graceful movements from hidden caves, posturing a moment in half-unseen attitudes, then gliding away with a flash of a fin, a sparkle of gleaming scales, or only a faint movement that melted into the all-pervading green silence. The thick vegetation resembled undersea growths, so heavily weighted was it with cool watery immobility. Even the birds were still. No warm breath came from the earth, and when a sound did penetrate the smothering silence, it came as a muffled murmur like that made by a swimmer, who moved in a dream.
As Louis penetrated deeper through the ocean-like caverns and passageways of the Bois, he slowly and completely lost his sense of identity. The coolness and heaviness, the radiant but subdued greenish light, the mysterious stillness, engulfed him. He did not feel the moist and spongy earth under his feet. He lost the imminence of his flesh, the pressure of his weariness, the lonely ache which haunted his every thought. The pathway he traversed descended deeper and deeper into the jade gloom, and the shadows blended into one dusky sanctuary of trance-like peace. His thoughts became diffused, formless, so that they floated away from him as upon the breast of a breathing pool, and he felt them go with a dreaming sense of release, as a drowning man releases his last feverish hold on a straw, and struggles no more.
Now, in the green mist, he saw a mermaid’s figure, whose flowing and voluminous garments were the same tint as the pervading light, poised lightly on a heap of black wide rocks. Her hair was golden in the floating gloom, streaming upon her delicate shoulders, and her face, neck and arms were white marble wavering in water, struck with feathers of drowned sunlight.
A hundred times, since he had left the noisy and turbulent purlieus of the Palais-Cardinal, he had anticipated this moment when he would see Marguerite de Tremblant again, and pain, ecstasy, fear and dread had halted him as though he had been struck in the breast. A dozen times he had actually turned and retreated, before proceeding on his way. When he had gone on, he had been like a man, drugged and helpless, forced to move his body under the compulsion of a stronger force. He had even dumbly prayed that she would not be there, that in these long days she had become weary of waiting for him, that he would find nothing but emptiness and loneliness waiting for him on the great flat rocks. So, at last, it was with the passionate hope that she had not come that he had finally allowed himself to enter the Bois.
But when he saw her upon those rocks, motionless, glimmering in the green and watery light of a world beneath the sea, he felt no shock of joy or dread. He moved towards her on an irresistible current, and there was nothing in him but the sweetest peace and the most exquisite rapture. Something whispered in his ear, hot and exigent, but he closed his hearing against it.
She did not smile when he stood at the foot of the rocks and gazed up at her. She swayed towards him, bending her neck, the copper curls streaming over it, and she gave him her hand. It was cool and soft in his own, and at its touch a stream of fire seemed to burst through his flesh in a very agony of expanding joy. Her eyes bent down into his, flecked with light, so that their brown hue was invaded with sparkles of vivid gold. Her soft rosy lips parted and she sighed.
She had become so frail that her flesh appeared to be translucent, and the febrile glow of her spirit pervaded it. With the sharp and searing prescience of passionate love, Louis felt a pang of sudden dread and anguish, of impending loss which filled him with black terror, with violent denial, with a soundless and howling cry. He pressed her hand to his lips, wildly kissing the palm, each finger, and finally, the fragile white wrist in which the veins pulsed with a desperate life. He felt the leaflike touch of her other hand as she laid it upon his bent head. And then, in a moment, she had drawn that head convulsively to her breast, and held it there in one supreme gesture of pure love.
And so they stood there, clasped together like flesh fused into one being, and Louis heard the soaring tremor of her heart. One by one, warm drops fell from her eyes upon his cheek. He felt infinite pity and gentleness in her, the most delicate of passions, the most tender of understanding. The terror had him still, but in her arms it was part of the ecstasy of his love.
They did not speak. They sat down together, still embracing, and now her head rested on his shoulder. They looked into the far green distances, darker now, for the sun had fallen behind a cloud. The shade was duskier, more unfathomable, more withdrawn under the earth, more motionless. His spirit was part of it, still throbbing with suffering, but so pervaded with peace and rapture that it was like a pain felt under opiates. There was nothing else in all eternity but those strange immobile shadows and silences, drawn up like impenetrable cloudy barriers between them and the world, shutting them off forever from weariness and loneliness.
He played with one of her shining curls. Its substance clung lovingly to his fingers. He kissed its perfumed length, until he approached her lips. Their mouths met simply, inevitably, with purity and sweetness.
At last, he tried to speak, but she laid her trembling fingers on his lips. She smiled through the tears that filled her eyes.
“No,” she whispered, “let us say nothing.”
Moments glided into an hour, and into another, and they sat there, not moving except for gentle caresses. Everything else had fallen into nothingness, had ceased to exist.