The Dulaurens family and their party filled the first row of the grand stand, Jean Berlier next to Isabelle, Marcel Guibert between Madame Dulaurens and Alice. Paule had refused to come with her brother, who sat quite silent, thinking of the sad faces of the women at home and regretting the peace and sweetness of Le Maupas, while beginning to experience the first humiliating inner symptoms of love. The band began to play dance music, and to the strains of its light rhythm, almost drowned by laughter and shouting, the battle opened. Late arrivals, hurrying across the race course eager to take part in the fun, were mingled in a distracted mass of gay parasols and dresses on the lawn. It was at the little ones that the first bouquets were thrown, gently tossed by delicate hands. The children opened the flowery procession like harbingers of spring, delicious buds of humanity. Rosy babies with bare arms, riding donkeys which carried them triumphantly in big red baskets; small sailor boys proudly wielding their pasteboard oars in long canoes decked with reeds, drawn by Arab horses whose tails and flowing manes served as angry waves; tiny girls dressed in pink, peeping out from green nests like wonderful birds; all this little company, guarded by an escort of careful nurses, was mad with applause and sunshine, with music and gaiety. It was like the youthful Bacchus in his triumph. Slowly the carriages following them came up one after another and took their part in the gentle strife. They bore the very grace of the earth, the beauty of women and the scent of flowers. The soul of the plundered gardens still pervaded these moving flower-beds. English dog-carts, tilburies, victorias, phaetons, landaus, all were smothered in flowers of a thousand hues--heavy moon-daisies, purple as an autumn sunset; while marguerites, the lover’s fortune-teller; gladioles with their red bells merrily a-ring; cyclamens the color of the lees of wine, the rare and precious jewels of Mont Revard’s crown; hydrangeas with their pink and pale blue globes; orchids of varying hue, splendid in their triumphant leaflessness, or still more glorious in a setting of exotic palm-branches or of red forest-heather, whose tiny branches are so slender and sensitive that the heat of the day is sufficient to stir them. Half outstretched among these sumptuous spoils of the ransacked gardens, the young women of the procession smiled in quiet confidence. They relied on the pleasure stirred by their irreproachable forms to complete their own success in the contest against the beautiful blossoms of mother earth. For they knew full well that they themselves were the sovereign flowers, more seductive and intoxicating than all others, since they could supplement the still unconscious grace of nature with the harmony of motion and the wonder of the intelligent mind. On the splendid, supple stem of a woman’s perfect form, is not the face set as though it were the divine calyx of beauty?