The Immoralist
T…'s advice, I now tried keeping them open at night; a little at first; soon I flung them wide; soon it became a habit, a need so great that directly the window was shut, I felt stifled. Later on, with what rapture was I to feel the night wind blow, the moon shine in upon me!…
But I am anxious to have done with these first stammerings after health. Indeed, thanks to constant attention, to pure air, to better food, I soon began to improve. Up till then, my breathlessness had made me dread the stairs and I had not dared to leave the terrace; in the last days of January I at last went down and ventured into the garden.
Marceline came with me, carrying a shawl. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. The wind, which is often violent in those parts and which I had found particularly unpleasant during the last few days, had dropped. The air was soft and charming.
The public gardens!… A very wide path runs through the middle of them, shaded by two rows of that kind of very tall mimosa, that out there is called cassia. Benches are placed in the shadow of the trees. A canalized river—one, I mean, that is not wide so much as deep, and almost straight—flows alongside the path; other smaller channels take the
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