The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become
extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to
gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its
fresh and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often
allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the
bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to
two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment
of undecipherable arabesque.
There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on
the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass
everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of
land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing in
this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;
venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over
towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had
inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that
which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over
towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,
clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,
married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep and
close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the
well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet
square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is
to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,
quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a
bouquet, solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.
In Floréal34 this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within its
four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered in
the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of
cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in its
veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,
sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling
steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,
flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,
perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there,
and it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling
about there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of
verdure, a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and
what the twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the
evening, a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a
shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the
intoxicating perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out
from every part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last
appeals of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed
among the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the
trees; by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect
the wings.
In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and
allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old
gate had the air of saying: “This garden belongs to me.”
It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every
side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple
of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of
Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the
Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in
vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other’s
course at the neighboring crossroads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had
passed over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence,
forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed
to restore to this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow,
tall weeds, great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green
cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring
forth from the depths of the earth and to reappear between those four
walls a certain indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature,
which disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds
herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant
as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian
garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the
New World.
Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound and
penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.
Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits the
rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb
and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little,
the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming
vision for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and
things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing
despises the other; all have need of each other. The light does not
bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing
what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the
sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of
the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a
meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places
on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two
possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a
pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars. The same
promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented, exists between the things
of the intelligence and the facts of substance. Elements and principles
mingle, combine, wed, multiply with each other, to such a point that
the material and the moral world are brought eventually to the same
clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually returning upon itself. In the
vast cosmic exchanges the universal life goes and comes in unknown
quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible mystery of effluvia,
employing everything, not losing a single dream, not a single slumber,
sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a planet there,
oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of thought an
element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all, except that
geometrical point, the _I_; bringing everything back to the soul-atom;
expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from summit to
base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the flight of an
insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who knows? Were it
only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the comet in the
firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop of water. A
machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of which is the
gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.