The vigorous vegetation and the quivering, deathlike
stillness of the old cemetery still reign in this path. In all the
country round Plassans there is no spot more instinct with languor,
solitude, and love. It is a most delightful place for love-making. When
the cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been heaped up in
this corner; for even to-day it frequently happens that one's foot comes
across some fragment of a skull lying concealed in the damp turf.
Nobody, however, now thinks of the bodies that once slept under that
turf. In the daytime only the children go behind the piles of wood when
playing at hide and seek. The green path remains virginal, unknown to
others who see nought but the wood-yard crowded with timber and grey
with dust. In the morning and afternoon, when the sun is warm, the whole
place swarms with life. Above all the turmoil, above the ragamuffins
playing among the timber, and the gipsies kindling fires under their
cauldrons, the sharp silhouette of the sawyer mounted on his beam stands
out against the sky, moving to and fro with the precision of clockwork,
as if to regulate the busy activity that has sprung up in this spot
once set apart for eternal slumber. Only the old people who sit on the
planks, basking in the setting sun, speak occasionally among themselves
of the bones which they once saw carted through the streets of Plassans
by the legendary tumbrel.
When night falls the Aire Saint-Mittre loses its animation, and looks
like some great black hole.
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