Orville stood beside the grave of his father, weather streaks across the red granite tombstone, across Robert St. Denis, and the dates: 1893-1921. Orville warped his hat to shed the rain and tried to button his makeshift coat closer, broken umbrella hooked over one arm, umbrella and coat from a Paris flea market. He had left Paris early in the morning, on a heaterless bus, a trip of delays and Nazi harassment. When he started to walk to his dad’s grave the sky had been bleak but not threatening. Maybe the sky was trying to flip its calendar, turn it back to another rainy day in June, when Robert had been wounded at Bermicourt, his little Renault tank exploding from a direct hit, on that muddy battlefield of World War I. Orville was peeved that the rain had caught him; he had wanted to sit on the grass and think of other times in Ermenonville. He noticed other graves in this family plot, those of Aunt Irene, Uncle Mark, his cousin, Marcel ... graves under leafless Lombardies. The rain made him resentful of the place and of death. The ground was spongy; the sod could absorb little more; he kicked at weeds with a quick kick. Through the poplars he observed the Petit Lac, its placid water grey: the small poplar covered island, at one side of the lake, with its carved Rousseau tomb, seemed adrift in the falling rain. Well, here we are, father and son, in the rain. I wish we could have shared our lives. You might have been a pretty fair provincial lawyer. The rain has had you a long time. If I’m killed in my tank I’d be carted here ... I guess we like it in Ermenonville. So long, Bob. He had never called his dad Bob. He had no memory of him except from photos: one of them came to mind, young face, maybe like his own. Moustache. Blond moustache. A tall man, lean, a horseman, dead for twenty-seven years. Tall man who had taken years to die the invalid’s death. So long ... A swan, on the little lake, close to the poplar planted shore, moved without any apparent effort, its reflection now bright, now dark, now in the rain, now in the clear. There were swans here when Jean Jacques Rousseau lived here ... swans ... château swans ... and when Rousseau said we should return to nature, had the swans influenced him? Walking toward his aunt’s house, Orville felt undercurrents as a boy in E, when the wind vane on Lautrec’s house had thrilled him, when the spire on the stone church had prodded more than clouds. In those days there had been frogs to spear in the Nonette, kites to fly, boats to sail on the Petit Lac. He passed the bronze statue of Rousseau in the village, a rain beaten thing. Cobbled streets fanned out from the figure. The statue was unchanged. The cobbles were the same. Smoke from peasant houses climbed as it had years ago. The rain was coming down as it had years ago: a beautiful scene.