Assuredly the nocturnal landscape was like an hallucination. For want of something better to do, I meditated on it. Without understanding why as well as I do to-day, I used to experience all its suggestiveness, and at nightfall I only ventured out unwillingly. Fonval itself was, I think, in spite of its countless flowers and its beautiful winding alleys, a most forbidding place. Its pointed windows, its hundred years old park inhabited by statues, the stagnant water of its pond, the precipice which closed it in, the Hell-like entrance, all these things made that ancient abbey (transformed into a _château_) peculiar even in daylight, and one would not have been surprised to learn that everybody there talked in fables. That would have been his real language. That at any rate was how I talked, and still more how I acted, during my holidays. These were for me a long fairy tale in which I played with imaginary or artificial personages, living in the water, in the trees, and under the earth oftener than upon it. If I passed the lawn galloping with my bare legs, my air clearly showed the squadrons of knights were, in my fancy, charging behind me. And the old boat I masted for the occasion with three broomsticks, on which bellied nondescript sails, served me as a galleon, and the pond became the Mediterranean bearing the fleet of the Crusaders. Lost in thought and looking at the water-lily islands and the grass peninsulas, I proclaimed: “Here are Corsica and Sardinia!... Italy is in sight.... We are sailing round Malta....” At the end of a minute I cried “Land!” We were landing in Palestine--“Montjoye and St. Denis!”--I suffered on that boat sea-sickness and home-sickness; the Holy War intoxicated me;--I learnt in it two things--enthusiasm and geography.... But often the other characters were represented. That made it more real. I remembered then--for every child has a Don Quixote in him--I remembered a giant Briareus who was the summerhouse, and especially a barrel which became the dragon of Andromeda. Oh, that barrel! I had made a head for it with the help of a squinting pumpkin, and vampire wings with two umbrellas. Having ambushed my contraption at the bend of an alley, leaning it up against a terra-cotta nymph, I set out in _search_ of it more valiant than the real Perseus, and, armed with a pole, I went caracoling on an invisible hippogriff. But when I _discovered_ it, the pumpkin leered at me so strangely that Perseus almost took flight, and the umbrellas owed it to his emotion that they were broken to pieces in the yellow blood of the facetious vegetable.