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Updated: May 7, 2025
In a word, we'd had two months of it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, singing Magali and the Qué Cantes, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provençal so that he could read the stuff in the Journal des Félibriges that he'd never have looked at if it had been in English....
She looked into the dark abyss of time with brooding eyes, and now and then with a long meditative glance at Lawson she sighed deeply. Then came the summer, and restlessness seized these young people. The blue skies lured them to the sea, and the pleasant breeze sighing through the leaves of the plane-trees on the boulevard drew them towards the country.
The recreation-ground was a sandy yard, in which stood eight plane-trees, which in summer cast cool shadows around. On the south side rose a wall, seventeen feet high, and bristling with broken glass, above which all that one saw of Plassans was the steeple of St. Mark, rising like a stony needle against the blue sky.
It seemed to him that he and the scorched plane-trees lining the sides of the road were the only living things in the wide sun-beaten street. Every house was shut up. Only the Greys' open windows, amid their shuttered neighbors, had a friendly human air. Yes; Mr. Grey was in, and expecting Mr. Elsmere. Robert climbed the dim, familiar staircase, his heart beating fast.
And he drew across his chair, in order to chat with his client. "So then you are looking out for a piece of ground in the neighborhood of Marseilles?" His breath, though not close to the baron, carried towards the latter that odor of garlic which the people of the South exhale as flowers do their perfume. Mordiane asked: "Is it your son that I met under the plane-trees?" "Yes. Yes, the second."
As soon as the sun began to sink she drew up the blind; and, as she sat knitting behind her counter, she serenely scanned the market square, where numerous urchins were poking about in the soil under the gratings which protected the roots of the plane-trees, while porters smoked their pipes on the benches along the footway, at either end of which was an advertisement column covered with theatrical posters, alternately green, yellow, red, and blue, like some harlequin's costume.
When the rising wind announced a storm, the swaying branches shed their dry bark, which was piled upon the hearth indoors, where a cheerful blaze shot up if by chance the rain fell and the air grew chilly. But very seldom did even a shower come to moisten the parched land and cool the heated air. Thus the plane-trees came to look upon the stove beneath them as a fixture.
It was a very poor inn, situated at the corner of the main street and of a road which branched off into the country. In front of it a few plane-trees, trained into an arbor, formed an arch of shade. A few feet of vine clambered about their trunks. The sun was scorching the leaves and the heavy bunches of grapes which hung here and there.
The Nile had overflowed its bed. The branches of the sycamores and plane-trees drooped and floated on the waves, but the boughs of the tall silver poplars strained upward, as if anxious to avoid the watery world beneath.
One of them has arrived at this moment, driven from the plane-trees in the square by the din of the rejoicings, to demand my hospitality. I can hear him in the top of a cypress near by. From up there, dominating the lyrical assembly, at regular intervals he cuts into the vague orchestration of the Grasshoppers and the Toads.
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