Chapter 2

The tale tells how Florian de Puysange came in the dawn through flowering gardens, and heard young people from afar, already about their maying. Two by two he saw them from afar as they went with romping and laughter into the tall woods behind Storisende to fetch back the Maypole with dubious old rites. And as they went they sang, as was customary, that song which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras made in the ancient time in honor of May’s ageless triumph.

Sang they:

“May shows with godlike showing

Today for each that sees

May’s magic overthrowing

All musty memories

In him whom May decrees

To be love’s own. He saith,

‘I wear love’s liveries

Until released by death.’

“Thus all we laud May’s sowing,

Nor heed how harvests please

When nowhere grain worth growing

Greets autumn’s questing breeze,

And garnerers garner these⁠—

Vain words and wasted breath

And spilth and tasteless lees⁠—

Until released by death.

“Unwillingly foreknowing

That love with May-time flees,

We take this day’s bestowing,

And feed on fantasies

Such as love lends for ease

Where none but travaileth,

With lean infrequent fees,

Until released by death.”

And Florian shook his sleek black head. “A very foolish and pessimistical old song, a superfluous song, and a song that is particularly out of place in the loveliest spot in the loveliest of all possible worlds.”

Yet Florian took no inventory of the gardens. There was but a happy sense of green and gold, with blue topping all; of twinkling, fluent, tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining leaves; a sense of pert bird noises, and of a longer shadow than usual slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere. Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism might hope to flourish.

Instead, it was of Adelaide that Florian thought: of the tall, impulsive, and yet timid, fair girl who was both shrewd and innocent, and of her tenderly colored loveliness, and of his abysmally unmerited felicity in having won her. Why, but what, he reflected, grimacing⁠—what if he had too hastily married somebody else? For he had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another: but this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.