That was the feeling with which it inspired me, and I never lingered on the bridge when I was alone. And I was often alone now, for Joubert, having extracted my parole d'honneur to be of good behaviour and not get into mischief or bolt back to Paris, spent most of his time at the château, where the caretaker had a pretty daughter, or at the cabaret at Etiolles, Lisette, the old woman who did our cooking and made our beds, being deputed deputy-gaoler. The weather had the feeling of early spring, though in the forest, half stricken by autumn, the leaves were falling--falling to every touch of the wind. Where the forest of Sénart began, and the woods of the château ended, the frontier was marked by a thin line of wire easy for a child to slip under. Then one felt free, free as the cock pheasant whose corkscrew-sounding voice echoed from the liquid twilight of the drives, free as the wind in the tree tops. The great pine forest of Lichtenberg had a voice. You would hear the wind rising and passing over its leagues of perfumed branches, and dying away, and rising and dying away--ever the same voice filling and deserting the same vast silence. But here, in the forest of Sénart, the tongue of the beech spoke a different language to that of the fir and the larch. There were open spaces, swathes of sunshine, forest pools like lost sapphires, where the bulrushes painted their forms on the water-surface, blue with the reflection of the autumn sky. These woods, whose echoes had once answered to the hunting-horn of Le Roi Soleil, were haunted, but not by the ghost of Pan. Rousseau had once botanised in them, and M. de Jussien, in his coat of ribbed Indian satin, his lilac silk vest, and white silk stockings of extraordinary fineness, had here filled his herbal with the vicris hieracioides and the cerastium aquaticum so dear to his herboristic heart. Pompadour had wandered where the rabbits played now; and the glades, shot through with sunlight and draped in the muslin of the morning mist, were the backgrounds beloved of Fragonnard for his wreaths of flying drapery, his fêtes champêtres, and his sylvan scenes. The forest keepers all wore a state uniform. Fanchard, the one who lived nearest to us, an old soldier and a crony of Joubert's, would take me with him whilst he set his traps; and there were gypsies that haunted the clearings, real children of Egypt these, lineal descendants of Hennequin Dandèche and Clopin Trouillefou. On the evening of our sixth day at the pavilion, a visitor arrived. It was my father. He had left his carriage in the road at the gates of the château, and had come to the pavilion on foot.