1

Rose was still asleep when I entered the drowsy bedroom to bid her good-bye. A small, heart-shaped opening in the middle of the shutters allowed the first ray of daylight to penetrate. Sleeping happily and trustfully, with streaming hair and hands out-flung, she lay strewn like the petals of a flower. I laid my lips on hers and softly went away.

As I climb the slope that leads out of Neufchatel, I turn and look down once more on the little town that slumbers everlastingly in its rich peace. Just there, by the church, I picture the house with its grey shutters, its white front and its starched caps behind the flower-pots. Beyond, the green horizons and the blue hill-sides stand clearly marked in the dawning sun; and I gaze and gaze as far as my eyes can see, through my lashes sparkling with tears.

For all her lethargy, her slumber as of a beautiful plant, the soul of my Rose is wholesome, wholesome as those meadows, those fields, all that good Norman
earth which gave her to me miserable only to take her back happy and free. Certainly, Rose has not been able to achieve the strength that makes use of liberty: in that life, still so young, the will is a dead branch through which the sap no longer flows. At any rate, what she does possess she will not lose; she is one of those who instinctively hold in their breath so as not to tarnish the pane through which a glimpse of infinity stands revealed to them. Her soul could not take in unlimited happiness, it had to feel a touch of sorrow in order to taste a little joy. There are many like her, people who perceive that the light is good when they come out of the darkness, but who are not able to recognise the light in the radiant beauty of the noon-day fields.

The sun rises as I slowly make my way up-hill; the wood along the road is still wet with the dawn. It offers me its autumnal fragrance; I breathe it in, I gaze at its golden tints, I think of Rose, of her past and her future. But, beyond my dreams, an unformed idea seems to spread like a clear sky, w............