"
"Play to me in the Luxembourg Gardens!"
"One can do anything one likes here; no one pays any attention to
anybody else," and she pointed with her parasol to a long poet, with
hair floating over his shoulders, who walked up and down the other end
of the alley reciting his verses.
"Perhaps your playing will interrupt him."
"Oh, if he doesn't like it he'll move away. But I don't want to play;
I can't play when I'm out of humour, and I was just in the very humour
for playing until your remark about--"
"About what?"
"You know very well," she answered.
The desire to hear her play the fiddle in the gardens gained upon me.
The moment was an enchanting one, the light falling through the
translucid leaves and the poet walking up and down carried my thoughts
into another age. I began to see a picture--myself, the poet, and
this girl playing the violin for us; other figures were wanting to
make up the composition. Cabanel's picture of the Florentine poet
intruded itself, interrupting my vision, the picture of Dante reading
his verses at one end of a stone bench to a frightened girl whose
lover is drawing her away from him who had been to Hell and witnessed
the tortures of the damned, who had met the miserable lovers of Rimini
whirling through space and heard their story from them.
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