The first work! That is what _Révolte_ was to André--the first work, always too copious and diffuse, into which the author tosses first of all a whole lifetime of ideas and opinions, pressing for utterance like water against the edge of a dam, and which is often the richest, if not the best, of an author's productions. As for the fate that awaited it, no one could say what it might be; and the uncertainty that hovered about the reading of the drama added to his emotion the emotion of each of his auditors, the white-robed hopes of Mademoiselle Élise, M. Joyeuse's fanciful hallucinations and the more positive desires of Aline, who was already in anticipation installing her sister in the nest, rocked by the winds but envied by the multitude, of an artist's household!
Ah! if one of those pleasure-seekers circling the lake for the hundredth time, overwhelmed by the monotony of his habit, had chanced to put aside the branches, how surprised he would have been at that picture! But would he have suspected all the passion and dreams and poetry and hope that were contained in that little nook of verdure hardly larger than the denticulated shadow of a fern on the moss?
"You were right, I did not know the Bois," said Paul in an undertone to Aline, as she leaned on his arm.
They were following a narrow sheltered path, and as they talked they walked very rapidly, far in advance of the others. But it was not Père Kontzen's terrace nor his crisp fritters that attracted them. No, the noble verses they had heard had carried them to a great height, and they had not yet descended. They walked straight on toward the ever-receding end of the path, which broadened at its extremity into a luminous glory, a dust of sunbeams, as if all the sunshine of that lovely day awaited them at the edge of the woods. Paul had never felt so happy. The light arm resting on his, the childlike step by which his own was guided, would have made life as sweet and pleasant to him as that walk upon the mossy carpet of a green path. He would have told the young girl as much, in words as simple as his feelings, had he not feared to alarm Aline's confidence, caused doubtless by the feeling which she knew that he entertained for another, and which seemed to forbid any thought of love between them.