48 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 
of solitude, and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but 
slowly and with unaccustomed ear, like one who shall have been some 
time dead, and have returned from the other world. 
In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable 
History, I had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth, 
with a heart less tender than ardent. At a later period, when 
residing in the suburb of Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love. 
I watched with interest my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so 
sensible every evening of the joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly 
grateful, How much more at Nantes, surrounded by a nature ever 
powerful and prolific, seeing the herbage shoot upward hour after 
hour, and all animal life multiplying around me, ought I not, I too, 
to expand and revive with this new sentiment ! 
If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and 
broken the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book 
which we frequently read in the evening, the “Birds of France,” 
by Toussenel, a charming and felicitous transition from the thought 
of country to that of nature. 
So long as France exists, his Lark and his Redbreast, his Bullfinch, 
his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there 
were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover 
all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the 
Gallic sense, the French esprit, the very soul of our fatherland. 
The formule of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its 
