Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/34

10 brightened by a fleeting glory such as Nature loves at times to use to heighten the grandeur of her imperishable creations. All the while that the detachment was crossing the valley, the rising sun had slowly scattered the thin white mists that hover above the fields in September mornings; and now when the soldiers looked back, an invisible hand seemed to raise the last of the veils that had covered the landscape. The fine delicate clouds were like a transparent gauze enshrouding precious jewels that lie, exciting our curiosity, behind it. All along the wide stretch of horizon that the officers could see, there was not the lightest cloud in heaven to persuade them by its silver brightness that that great blue vault above them was really the sky. It was more like a silken canopy held up by the uneven mountain peaks, and borne aloft to protect this wonderful combination of field and plain and wood and river.

The officers did not weary of scanning that extent of plain, which gave rise to so much beauty of field and wood. Some of them looked hither and thither for long before their gaze was fixed at last on the wonderful diversity of color in the woods, where the sober hues of groups of trees that were turning sere brought out more fully the richer hues of the bronze foliage, a contrast heightened still further by irregular indentations of emerald green meadow. Others dwelt on the warm coloring of the fields, with their cone-shaped stooks of buckwheat piled up like the sheaves of arms that soldiers make in a bivouac, and the opposing hues of the fields of rye that were interspersed among them, all golden with stubble after the harvest. There was a dark-colored slate roof here and there, with a white smoke ascending from it ; and here again a bright silvery streak of some winding bit of the Couësnon would attract the gaze—a snare for the eyes which follow it, and so lead the soul all unconsciously into vague musings. The fresh fragrance of the light autumn wind and the strong forest scents came up like an intoxicating incense for those who stood admiring this beautiful country, and saw with delight its strange wild-flowers and