By my order they have closed the door with bolt and bar. The porter sleeps in his corner, his head sunk on his breast; all the servants sleep. Only a pane of glass separates me from the garden; and the silence is so complete that, all the way to the walls of the enclosure, the mice between two floors, the lice in the breasts of the pigeons, the bubble of a dandelion on its fragile stem, must feel the noise in their midst as I open the door. The celestial spaces appear to me, with the sun just where I had imagined it, in the afternoon splendor. On high, a kite descends in wide circles through the blue; from the summit of a pine a cone falls. I am glad to be where I am. My walks in this enclosed place are distinguished by precaution and a taciturn and quiet vigilance,--as a fisher fears to startle fish in the water if he so much as thinks. There is no trace here of that free and open country which distracts the mind and leads on the body. The trees and the flowers conspire to my captivity; and, as in a child’s game the player must continually go back and begin again, so all the turns in this thick grass lead me to that furthest corner, where the wells are. Across the little hill, by means of a long cord, I shake the invisible pail. Like a ripening fruit, like a poet maturing his thought, I rest in the immobility all about me where life is measured only by the circling of the sun, by the beating of my pulse,--by the growth of my hair. Vainly the turtle-dove makes her pure and sad appeal, heard from afar. I will not stir from the house today. In vain the murmur of the great river reaches me. At midnight, returning from a ball where, during many hours, I have watched human beings,--some in black, others in quainter draperies,--turning in couples (each figure expressing incomprehensible satisfaction) to the gymnastic modulations of a piano; at the moment when the porters who have reached the top of the stairway lift the curtain of my litter, I see in the light of my lantern, under the torrential rain, a magnolia tree adorned with great ivory globes. Oh, fresh apparition! Oh, confirmation of imperishable treasure in the night!