Oh! how wonderful, and yet how sinister, the end of the garden looked seen by those sudden and great flashes of green light that shimmered and trembled about us from time to time, and then left us blind in the blackness of the stormy night.

And I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the continual crashing of the branches of the trees in the near-by oak forest.
We found Duruy's "History" in the asparagus bed all water soaked and mud bespattered.

Before the storm the snails, exhilarated no doubt by the promise of rain, had crawled over the book and they had left their slimy, glistening traces upon it.
Those small tracks remained on the book for a long time, preserved, doubtless, by the paper cover that I put over them.

They had the power to recall a thousand things to me, thanks to that peculiarity of my mind that associates the most dissimilar and incongruous images if only once, for a single favorable moment, they have been accidentally joined.
And therefore the little, shining, zig-zag marks on the cover of Duruy always brought to my mind Rameau's gay dance that I played on the shrill old piano, only to have it drowned by the noise of the raging storm; and the same little blotches also recall to me a vision that I had that night (one, no doubt, born of an engraving by Teniers that hung on the wall); there seemed to pass before my eyes little people belonging to a bygone age who danced in the shade of a wood like that of Limoise; the apparition awakened in me an appreciation of the pastoral gayety of that time, a conception of the abandon and joyousness of the picnickers who were dancing so merrily under the spreading branches of the oak trees..