But what was she to gather now?  She had stripped the parterre bare.  As she rose upon the tips of her shoes in the dim gloom, she could only see the garden lying there naked and dead, deprived of the tender eyes of its roses, the crimson smile of its carnations, and the perfumed locks of its heliotropes.  Nevertheless, she could not return with empty arms.  So she laid hands upon the herbs and leafy plants.  She crawled over the ground, as though she would have carried off the very soil itself in a clutch of supreme passion.  She filled her skirt with a harvest of aromatic plants, southernwood, mint, verbenas.  She came across a border of balm, and left not a leaf of it unplucked.  She even broke off two big fennels which she threw over her shoulders like a couple of trees.  Had she been able, she would have carried all the greenery of the garden away with her between her teeth.  When she reached the threshold of the pavilion, she turned round and gave a last look at the Paradou.  It was quite dark now.  The night had fully come and cast a black veil over everything.  Then for the last time she went up the stairs, never more to step down them.

The spacious room was quickly decked.  She had placed a lighted lamp upon the table.  She sorted out the flowers heaped upon the floor and arranged them in big bunches, which she distributed about the room.  First she placed some lilies behind the lamp on the table, forming with them a lofty lacelike screen which softened the light with its snowy purity.  Then she threw handfuls of carnations and stocks over the old sofa, which was already strewn with red bouquets that had faded a century ago, till all these were hidden, and the sofa looked like a huge bed of stocks bristling with carnations.  Next she placed the four armchairs in front of the alcove.  On the first one she piled marigolds, on the second poppies, on the third mirabilis, and on the fourth heliotrope.  The chairs were completely buried in bloom, with nothing but the tips of their arms visible.  At last she thought of the bed.  She pushed a little table near the head of it, and reared thereon a huge pile of violets.  Then she covered the whole bed with the hyacinths and tuberoses she had plucked.  They were so abundant that they formed a thick couch overflowing all around, so that the bed now looked like one colossal bloom.

The roses still remained.  And these she scattered chancewise all over the room, without even looking to see where they fell.  Some of them dropped upon the table, the sofa, and the chairs; and a corner of the bed was inundated with them.  For some minutes there was a rain of roses, a real downpour of heavy blossoms, which settled in flowery pools in the hollows of the floor.  But as the heap seemed scarcely diminished, she finished by weaving garlands of roses which she hung upon the walls.  She twined wreaths around the necks and arms and waists of the plaster cupids that sported over the alcove.  The blue ceiling, the oval panels, edged with flesh-coloured ribbon, the voluptuous paintings, preyed upon by time, were all hung with a mantle, a drapery of roses.  The big room was fully decked at last.  Now she could die there.