That idol, black eyes and yellow hair, without ancestors or court, nobler than fable, Mexican or Flemish: his domain, in insolent azures and greens, runs over beaches called names savagely Greek, Slav, Celt, by the shipless waves.
    At the edge of the forest - flowers of dream tinkle, bloom and flash, - the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the pure deluge that wells the meadows, nakedness shadowed, traversed and decked with rainbow, flora, sea.
   Ladies swirling on the terraces near the ocean; little girls and giant women, sublime blacks on verdigris moss, jewels standing on the thick ground of the groves and thawing gardens, - young mothers and older sisters with eyes full of pilgrimage, sultanas, princesses with tyrannical gaits and costumes, small foreign women and tenderly miserable people.
    Such tedium, times of "beloved body" and "dear heart"!
 

It's her, the little girl, dead under the rosebushes. - The young mother, deceased, descends the stair. - Her cousin's carriage creaks over the sand. - The little brother - (but he's in India!) there, before the sunset in a field of carnations. - The elderly who are all buried upright in the battlements of wallflowers.
    A swarm of golden leaves surrounds the general's house.  They are in the South. - You follow the red road to the empty inn.  The chateau is for sale; the shutters hang loose. - The parish priest has probably taken the key to the church. - Around the park, the keepers huts are empty.  The fences are so high that you can only see the rustling tree-tops.  There's nothing to see in there anyway.
    The fields lead into villages with no cocks, no anvils.  The sluices are lifted.  O the roadside crosses and desert windmills, the islands and the millstones.
      Magic flowers were humming.  The slopes cradled him.  Fabulously elegant beasts circulated.  The clouds amassed over high seas made of an eternity of blazing tears.
 

In the woods there is a bird, his song makes you stop and blush.
    There is a clock that never strikes.
    There is a rut with a nest full of white animals.
    There is a cathedral that goes down and a lake that goes up.
    There is a little cart abandoned in the thicket, or rolling down the path, trimmed with ribbons.
    There is a troupe of little players in costume, glimpsed on the road that runs through the edge of the woods.
    There is, finally, when you are hungry and thirsty, someone who drives you away.
 

I am the saint, praying on the terrace, - like those placid beasts that grazed down to the sea of Palestine.
    I am the scholar in the dark armchair.  Branches and rain beat against the casement of the library.
    I am the pedestrian on the highway through tiny forests; the roar of the sluices drowns out my footsteps.  I watch at length the golden melancholy wash of sunset.
   I could be the abandoned child on the jetty, left to the high seas, a little lackey following the alley whose crest touches the sky.
    The paths are harsh.  The hills are covered with broom.  The air is still.  How far away are the birds and fountains!  It can only be the end of the world, ahead.
 

So, let them rent me a tomb, whitewashed with protruding lines of cement, - a very long way under the earth.
    I prop my elbows on the table, the lamp shines brilliantly over newspapers that I am an idiot to re-read, on books without interest.
    At a great distance above my underground lounge, the houses entrench themselves, fog gathers.  The silt is red or black.  Monstrous city, unending night!
    The sewers aren't so far above.  To either side, nothing but the thickness of the earth.  Perhaps chasms of azure, wells of fire.  It is perhaps on this plane that moons and comets, oceans and fables, meet.
    In my bitter hours I imagine balls of sapphire and metal.  I am the chief of silence.  Why does the impression of a window pale in the corner of the vault?