It seemed to them, in their
lively fancies, that their love had shot up like some vigorous plant in
this nook of soil which dead men's bones had fertilised. It had grown,
indeed, like those wild weeds, it had blossomed as blossom the poppies
which sway like bare bleeding hearts at the slightest breeze. And
they ended by fancying that the warm breaths passing over them, the
whisperings heard in the gloom, the long quivering which thrilled the
path, came from the dead folk sighing their departed passions in
their faces, telling them the stories of their bridals, as they turned
restlessly in their graves, full of a fierce longing to live and love
again. Those fragments of bone, they felt convinced of it, were full of
affection for them; the shattered skulls grew warm again by contact with
their own youthful fire, the smallest particles surrounded them with
passionate whispering, anxious solicitude, throbbing jealousy. And when
they departed, the old burial-ground seemed to groan. Those weeds,
in which their entangled feet often stumbled on sultry nights, were
fingers, tapered by tomb life, that sprang up from the earth to detain
them and cast them into each other's arms. That pungent and penetrating
odour exhaled by the broken stems was the fertilising perfume, the
mighty quintessence of life which is slowly elaborated in the grave,
and intoxicates the lovers who wander in the solitude of the paths.
The dead, the old departed dead, longed for the bridal of Miette and
Silvere.
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