I was tempted, for a moment, to admit that that also was being reborn in me. And then, no--no! I assured myself that I had been separated from it beyond return, by my reading and speculations. This past would never blossom again. At least I recalled the memory of it with tenderness. For a long time I had thought myself rallied to the quizzical scepticism of Laquarrière and his like. How many ties still bound me to the unsophisticated child that I had been. I would have the sons that Jeannine gave me brought up in the lap of Catholicism, too. Neither their mother nor I would take any steps to convert them to pitiless reason too soon. Like us they might, later on, be led away by the trend of modern thought and forsake religion, but their stay in its realm would leave them like me with respect for the Illusion reflected in certain eyes. Guillaumin came to tell us that it would not be long before we started, the regiment next us was on the move. "What a glorious day!" he exclaimed. The eight o'clock sun was slipping through the tracery of the branches on to the leaves grown rusty at the approach of autumn. The air was mild and warm. Swarms of midges were flying about. We caught the hum of mosquitoes' wings, but they did not sting. The men were rolling about on the moss; our Parisians conjured up the delights of the Bois de Verrières. We all three went to the edge of the little wood. De Valpic stretched out his arms and drank in the health-giving air, soaked with light. "Ah! How good it is!" he said. "How one lives here! How one realises--too late--that one was ill-suited for living in towns, that one would have done better in beautiful country like this!" Guillaumin laughed. "A little flat, this country. It's certainly not up to Argonne!" "My dear chap, don't talk like a snob. Just put your prejudices aside for a moment, and take a look." De Valpic playfully made us admire the trees, the play of the sunlight and the breeze, the immense vista on the right, over a sea of waving corn, and down below those wooded islets, outposts of the deep forests which, we knew, dominated the surrounding country. The sweetly named Île de France, the land of plenty and of poetry--the most pleasant climate in the world. Senlis and Compiègne, a few miles away--Jean Jacques' Ermenonville gracious legends spring from this soil. Not far off Gérard de Nerval had sung of Sylvia. His playfulness was not assumed. We listened to him captivated. I tasted in his conversation a sort of funereal charm. I felt as if I were listening to Socrates conversing with his disciples as he drank the hemlock. The air was filled with whirring sounds. We had a vivid and fleeting vision of two aeroplanes, a French one and a Taube, passing over our heads, struggling for height and speed, engaged in a duel to the death, both of them armed with machine-guns which crackled under the open sky.