Here you see the Italian pine, the stone pine, with its red bark and its majestic parasol; here a cedar two hundred years old, weeping willows, a Norway spruce, and a beech which overtops them all; and there, in front of the main tower, some very singular shrubs,--a yew trimmed in a way that recalls some long-decayed garden of old France, and magnolias with hortensias at their feet.

In short, the place is the Invalides of the heroes of horticulture, once the fashion and now forgotten, like all other heroes.
A chimney, with curious copings, which was sending forth great volumes of smoke, assured me that this delightful scene was not an opera setting.

A kitchen reveals human beings.

Now imagine _me_, Blondet, who shiver as if in the polar regions at Saint-Cloud, in the midst of this glowing Burgundian climate.

The sun sends down its warmest rays, the king-fisher watches on the shores of the pond, the cricket chirps, the grain-pods burst, the poppy drops its morphia in glutinous tears, and all are clearly defined on the dark-blue ether.