NEWS OF SPRING 



the impertinence of the roses that climb up to them to bear 

 witness to life, they stripped themselves for their winter sleep. 

 Sombre and grim and bare as the dead, they await the Spring 

 that bursts forth around them; and, by a strange and excessive 

 reaction, they wait for it longer than under the harsh, gloomy 

 sky of Paris, for in Paris the buds are already beginning to 

 shoot. One recognizes them here and there amid the holiday 

 throng whose moveless dances witch the hills. They are not 

 many and they conceal themselves: they are gnarled oaks, 

 beeches, plane-trees ; and even the vine, which one had thought 

 better-mannered, more docile and well-informed, remains in- 

 credulous. There they stand, dismal and gaunt, like cripples 

 on an Easter Sunday in the church-porch made transparent by 

 the splendour of the sun. They have been there for years: 

 some of them, perhaps, for two or three centuries; but they 

 have the terror of Winter in their marrow. They will never 

 lose the habit of death. They have too much experience, they 

 are too old to forget and too old to learn. Their hardened 

 reason refuses to admit the light when it does not come at 

 the accustomed time. They are rugged old men, too wise to 

 enjoy unforeseen pleasures. They are wrong: wisdom should 

 not prohibit the finer indiscretions. Here, around the old, 



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