The poets, in their envious verse, sing the immortality of nature, which dies each autumn and revives each spring.

The poets are mistaken; nature does not die each autumn, she only falls asleep; she is not resuscitated, she awakens.

The day when our globe really dies, it will be dead indeed.

Then it will roll into space or fall into the abysses of chaos, inert, mute, solitary, without trees, without flowers, without verdure, without poets.
But on this beautiful day of the 23d of February, 1800, sleeping nature dreamed of spring; a brilliant, almost joyous sun made the grass in the ditches on either side of the road sparkle with those deceptive pearls of the hoarfrost which vanish at a touch, and rejoice the heart of a tiller of the earth when he sees them glittering at the points of his wheat as it pushes bravely up through the soil.

All the windows of the diligence were lowered, to give entrance to this earliest smile of the Divine, as though all hearts were saying: "Welcome back, traveller long lost in the clouds of the West, or beneath the heaving billows of Ocean!" Suddenly, about an hour after leaving Chatillon, the diligence stopped at a bend of the river without any apparent cause.