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Gretz has been my academy, my sanatorium, my heaven of innocent pleasures. If millions are offered me, I wave them back: Retro, Sathanas! Evil one, begone! Fix your mind on my example; despise riches, avoid the debasing influence of cities. Hygiene hygiene and mediocrity of fortune these be your watchwords during life!
Their entrance into Gretz was heralded and accompanied by a most furious barking; all the dogs in the village seemed to smell the treasure in the noddy. But there was no one in the street, save three lounging landscape-painters at Tentaillon's door.
It seemed as if every blade of grass must hide a cigale; and the fields rang merrily with their music, jingling far and near as with the sleigh-bells of the fairy queen. From their station on the slope the eye embraced a large space of poplared plain upon the one hand, the waving hill-tops of the forest on the other, and Gretz itself in the middle, a handful of roofs.
It seemed as if every blade of grass must hide a cigale; and the fields rang merrily with their music, jingling far and near as with the sleigh-bells of the fairy queen. From their station on the slope the eye embraced a large space of poplar'd plain upon the one hand, the waving hill-tops of the forest on the other, and Gretz itself in the middle, a handful of roofs.
The indefatigable birds turned and flickered about Gretz church-tower. A healthy wind blew from over the forest, and the sound of innumerable thousands of tree-tops and innumerable millions on millions of green leaves was abroad in the air, and filled the ear with something between whispered speech and singing.
His travels did not end when he left his frail craft at Pontoise, for, returning to Gretz, on the skirts of Fontainebleau, he first met his future wife, and that led a few years later to his following her to San Francisco, when she was free to remarry. He crossed the Atlantic and America as an Emigrant. That mode of life proved too hard for him.
It is the history of many towns; but Gretz never rose again; it was never rebuilt; its ruins were a quarry to serve the growth of rivals; and the stones of Gretz are now erect along the streets of Nemours. It gratifies me that our old house was the first to rise after the calamity; when the town had come to an end, it inaugurated the hamlet." "I, too, am glad of that," said Jean-Marie.
Alas! what a long way off is all this confusion nothing left of it but my quiet words spoken in your ear and the town itself shrunk to the hamlet underneath us! By-and-by came the English wars you shall hear more of the English, a stupid people, who sometimes blundered into good and Gretz was taken, sacked, and burned.
When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them.
'Thank you, said the Doctor warmly, rising at the same time and wiping his brow, for he had suffered agonies while the thing hung in the wind. A refusal, after the scene at noon, would have placed him in a ridiculous light before Anastasie. 'How hot and heavy is the evening, to be sure! I have always had a fancy to be a fish in summer, Jean-Marie, here in the Loing beside Gretz.
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