Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

In the gardens of Versailles, as everywhere else within the freezing influence of the Grand Monarque, nature herself seemed to accept the situation, and succumbed inevitably under the chain of order and courtly etiquette. The grass grew, indeed, and the Great Waters played, but the former was rigorously limited to certain mathematical patches, and permitted only to obtain an established length, while the latter threw their diamond showers against the sky with the regular and oppressive monotony of clockwork. The avenues stretched away straight and stiff like rows of lately-built houses; the shrubs stood hard and defiant as the white statues with which they alternated, and the very sunshine off the blinding gravel glared and scorched as if its duty were but to mark a march of dazzling hours on square stone dials for the kings of France.

Down in Touraine the woods were sleeping, hushed, and peaceful in the glowing summer’s day, sighing, as it were, and stirring in their repose, while the breeze crept through their shadows, and quivered in their outskirts, ere it passed on to cool the peasant’s brow, toiling contented in his clearing, with blue home-spun garb, white teeth, and honest sunburnt face.

Far off in Normandy, sleek of skin and rich of colour, cows were ruminating knee-deep in pasturage; hedges were loaded with wild flowers, thickets dark with rank luxuriance of growth, while fresh streams, over which the blue kingfisher flitted like a dragon-fly, rippled merrily down towards the sea. Through teeming orchards, between waving cornfields, past convent-walls grown over with woodbine and lilac and laburnum, under stately churches, rearing Gothic spires, delicate as needlework, to heaven, and bringing with them a cool current of air, a sense of freedom and refreshment as they hurried past. Nay, even where the ripening sun beat fiercely on the vineyards, terraced tier upon tier, to concentrate his rays—where Macon and Côte-d’Or were already tinged with the first faint blush of their coming vintage, even amidst the grape-rows so orderly planted and so carefully trained, buxom peasant-girls could gather posies of wild flowers for their raven hair, to make their black eyes sparkle with merrier glances, and their dusky cheeks mantle in rich carnation, type of southern blood dancing through their veins.