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By Root 1323 0

to tell her grandchildren to come, as she felt cold, adding: “A thousand thanks. I am sorry to give you so much trouble!” Suddenly the sky was rent in two; between the Punch-and-Judy and the horses, against the opening horizon, I had just seen, like a miraculous sign, Mademoiselle’s blue feather. And now Gilberte was running at full speed towards me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, animated by the cold, her lateness and the desire for a game; shortly before she reached me, she slid along the ice and, either to keep her balance, or because it appeared to her graceful, or else pretending that she was on skates, it was with outstretched arms that she smilingly advanced, as though to embrace me. “Bravo! bravo! that’s splendid; ‘topping,’ I should say, like you—‘sporting,’ I suppose I ought to say, only I’m a hundred-and-one, a woman of the old school,” exclaimed the old lady, uttering, on behalf of the voiceless Champs-Elysées, their thanks to Gilberte for having come without letting herself be frightened away by the weather. “You are like me, faithful at all costs to our old Champs-Elysées. We’re two brave souls! You wouldn’t believe me, I dare say, if I told you that I love them, even like this. This snow (I know you’ll laugh at me), it makes me think of ermine!” And the old lady began to laugh herself.

The first of these days—to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that could deprive me of the sight of Gilberte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure, because it changed the outward form and almost forbade the use of the customary scene of our only encounters, now altered, covered, as it were, in dust-sheets—that day, none the less, marked a stage in the progress of my love, for it was like a first sorrow that we shared together. There were only our two selves of our little company, and to be thus alone with her was not merely like a beginning of intimacy, but also on her part—as though she had come there solely to please me in such weather—it seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days when she had been invited to a party, she had given it up in order to come to join me in the Champs-Elysées; I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so enduring amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings; and while she stuffed snowballs down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what seemed to me at once a predilection that she showed for me in thus tolerating me as her travelling companion in this new and wintry land, and a sort of loyalty which she cherished for me through evil times. Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to play and, since this day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up, before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard the first day calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: “No, no, I’m sure you’d much rather be in Gilberte’s camp; besides, look, she’s signalling to you.” She was in fact summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to “take the field,” which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had turned into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.

This day which I had so dreaded was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.

For, although I now no longer thought of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the instinctive reflection that if she had been run over in the street and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs-Elysées; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone) yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited so impatiently all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments; and well did