Célestin seemed tipsy. One can fancy a newly arrived angel in the fields of Paradise drunk with color and light. She dashed into hedgerows after wild flowers, and clapped her hands at butterflies, and cried out with happiness when she saw a lamb just like one of the lambs one sees in the Magazin du Louvre at Christmas time, but this one dancing round its mother in the middle of a field pied with daisies. “She has gone mad,” said Toto, delighted with the delight of his _protégée_. “’Tis the primitive woman breaking out,” said Gaillard. “Proceed, Alphonse, and if you drop that basket I will flay you! Believe me, Désiré, every woman is a nymph at heart. I know several women who are devotees when in Paris, but in the country they become hamadryadic; ’tis the influence of the trees—they remember Pan. Have you read my little brochure ‘Pan in Paris’? It appeared as a feuilleton in _Lucifer_, the journal of the Satanists. I am not a Satanist; I despise the sect. I went to their church once; Satan in person was to appear. He did; the lights were lowered, but he did not frighten me, for I had heard him bleating in the vestry before he was brought on—it was a goat. Besides it was very dull; I left in the middle of the sermon, and Satan smelt dreadfully. I had to burn pastilles in my room for three days to help me to forget him.” They skirted the happy little town, and made for a part of the chestnut forest declared by Alphonse to be suitable for picnics. Here, beneath the trees on the edge of the sunlight, the basket was deposited on the greensward, and Gaillard flung himself down to rest. “I will leave you here,” said Toto, “to get the things ready, and I will take Célestin to the hill-top to see the view.” “Leave me, then, your cigarette case,” murmured Gaillard, his hat over his eyes, and his arms flung out on either side; “and do not be long, Désiré, for I am famished.” From the hill of Montmorency the whole world of April lay before them, in its midst Paris, the city of light, sixteen miles away, cream-colored and drab; Paris the noisy, silent amidst all that silent country stretching away in billows of tender green to the sky of pale and wonderful blue. “Oh, _ciel_!” sighed Célestin, removing her gloves as she sat by Toto, and folding them carefully inside out and putting them in her pocket. “Can that be Paris, that little place? my thumb covers it when I hold it so. And, oh, the sky!—it seems to stretch to heaven. How happy the world is!” “Do you find it happy?” asked Toto, tearing up wild violets and flinging them away to keep his hands employed. “Yes,” said Célestin, breathing the word out in a manner that made it a prayer of praise. “But you are not rich—you are like me; and they say the rich see more of the pleasure of the world than we do. Tell me, would you like to be a great lady, one of those one sees in the Bois?” “Oh, no!” said Célestin; “I would much rather be myself.”