This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the carthorses browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the spaces between the trees and force the passerby to bend his head; one walks over this uncultivated land, and one’s foot dives into mole-holes. In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat, descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side, its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam. Nearly all the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not had its bullet or its biscayan. 18 The skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is a wood full of violets.