He made three other visits in the old quarter, and then went to see a lady in the new town. When they found themselves in the street again, he said: “Do you know that, if you were a courageous girl, we should walk to Séguiranne, to see Sophie at her aunt’s. That would give me pleasure.” The distance was scarcely three kilometers; that would be only a pleasant walk in this delightful weather. And she agreed gaily, not sulky now, but pressing close to him, happy to hang on his arm. It was five o’clock. The setting sun spread over the fields a great sheet of gold. But as soon as they left Plassans they were obliged to cross the corner of the vast, arid plain, which extended to the right of the Viorne. The new canal, whose irrigating waters were soon to transform the face of the country parched with thirst, did not yet water this quarter, and red fields and yellow fields stretched away into the distance under the melancholy and blighting glare of the sun, planted only with puny almond trees and dwarf olives, constantly cut down and pruned, whose branches twisted and writhed in attitudes of suffering and revolt. In the distance, on the bare hillsides, were to be seen only like pale patches the country houses, flanked by the regulation cypress. The vast, barren expanse, however, with broad belts of desolate fields of hard and distinct coloring, had classic lines of a severe grandeur. And on the road the dust lay twenty centimeters thick, a dust like snow, that the slightest breath of wind raised in broad, flying clouds, and that covered with white powder the fig trees and the brambles on either side. Clotilde, who amused herself like a child, listening to this dust crackling under her little feet, wished to hold her parasol over Pascal. “You have the sun in your eyes. Lean a little this way.” But at last he took possession of the parasol, to hold it himself. “It is you who do not hold it right; and then it tires you. Besides, we are almost there now.” In the parched plain they could already perceive an island of verdure, an enormous clump of trees. This was La Séguiranne, the farm on which Sophie had grown up in the house of her Aunt Dieudonné, the wife of the cross old man. Wherever there was a spring, wherever there was a rivulet, this ardent soil broke out in rich vegetation; and then there were walks bordered by trees, whose luxuriant foliage afforded a delightful coolness and shade. Plane trees, chestnut trees, and young elms grew vigorously. They entered an avenue of magnificent green oaks.