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Les Misérables

Chapter 32

That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other. All nature seemed to be having a holiday, and to be laughing.

The flower-beds of Saint-Cloud perfumed the air; the breath of the Seine rustled the leaves vaguely; the branches gesticulated in the wind, bees pillaged the jasmines; a whole bohemia of butterflies swooped down upon the yarrow, the clover, and the sterile oats; in the august park of the King of France there was a pack of vagabonds, the birds.

The four merry couples, mingled with the sun, the fields, the flowers, the trees, were resplendent.

And in this community of Paradise, talking, singing, running, dancing, chasing butterflies, plucking convolvulus, wetting their pink, open-work stockings in the tall grass, fresh, wild, without malice, all received, to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine, who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love.

'You always have a queer look about you,' said Favourite to her. Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples are a profound appeal to life and nature, and make a caress and light spring forth from everything.

There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests expressly for those in love,—in that eternal hedge-school of lovers, which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers.

The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden times, all are subjects of this fairy.

They laugh and hunt, and there is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis—what a transfiguration effected by love! Notaries’ clerks are

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