THE SADDER the season, the more in tune with my nature. Snowy weather, by making travel more difficult, isolated the inhabitants of the countryside. One felt better inside human shelter.
A moral character clings to autumn scenes. Those leaves that fall like our years, those blossoms that fade like our hours, those clouds that flee like our illusions, the light that grows weak like our wits, the sun that cools like our passions, the waves that freeze over like our lives: these things have some secret rapport with our destinies.
I looked forward to the return of the stormy season with unspeakable pleasure. I loved to observe the passage of swans and woodpigeons, and to watch the crows congregating on the meadow near the pond at nightfall, when they went to perch on the tallest oaks of the Grand Mall. When the evening raised its bluish mist over the clearings of the forests, when the plaintive music of the winds wailed in the withered mosses, I would come into full possession of my natural sympathies. If I met with a farmer at the end of some fallow field, I would stop to look at this man whose seedtime was spent in the shadow of the same wheat among which he would soon be reaped, a man who, turning the earth of his own grave with the blade of his plow, mingled his hot sweat with the icy rains of autumn: the furrow he cut was the only monument destined to survive him. But what did my elegant sprite have to do with this? Through her magic, she transported me to the banks of the Nile and showed me the Egyptian pyramids bedded in sand, subject to the same laws that would one day hide the Armorican furrow beneath the heather. I congratulated myself on having placed the fables of my happiness far beyond the circle of human realities.
In the evenings, I used to take a boat across the pond, rowing alone between the cattails and the large floating leaves of the water lilies. There, gathering their strength to fly from our lands again, the swallows flocked. I did not neglect a single note of their chirruping: Tavernier as a child was less attentive to a traveler’s tale.[10] The birds frolicked over the water at sunset, pursuing insects, shooting together up into the air, as if to test their wings, then swooping down again to the surface of the lake, and coming to rest on the reeds that scarcely bent beneath their weight, and they filled the air with their clamorous song.