black pines raise their immovable summits.  She reproached herself for feeling anxiety without reason, when, on the contrary, she should be reassured and joyful.  She knew she would meet Jacques Dechartre in Paris.  They would have liked to arrive there at the same time, or, rather, to go there together.  They had thought it indispensable that he should remain three or four days longer in Florence, but their meeting would not be retarded beyond that.  They had appointed a rendezvous, and she rejoiced in the thought of it.  She wore her love mingled with her being and running in her blood.  Still, a part of herself remained in the pavilion decorated with goats and nymphs a part of herself which never would return to her.  In the full ardor of life, she was dying for things infinitely delicate and precious.  She recalled that Dechartre had said to her:  “Love likes charms.  I gathered from the terrace the leaves of a tree that you had admired.”  Why had she not thought of taking a stone of the pavilion wherein she had forgotten the world?

A shout from Pauline drew her from her thoughts.  Choulette, jumping from a bush, had suddenly kissed the maid, who was carrying overcoats and bags into the carriage.  Now he was running through the alleys, joyful, his ears standing out like horns.  He bowed to the Countess Martin.

“I have, then, to say farewell to you, Madame.”

He intended to remain in Italy.  A lady was calling him, he said:  it was Rome.  He wanted to see the cardinals.  One of them, whom people praised as an old man full of sense, would perhaps share the ideas of the socialist and revolutionary church.  Choulette had his aim:  to plant on the ruins of an unjust and cruel civilization the Cross of Calvary, not dead and bare, but vivid, and with its flowery arms embracing the world.  He was founding with that design an order and a newspaper.  Madame Martin knew the order.  The newspaper was to be sold for one cent, and to be written in rhythmic phrases.  It was a newspaper to be sung.  Verse, simple, violent, or joyful, was the only language that suited the people.  Prose pleased only people whose intelligence was very subtle.  He had seen anarchists in the taverns of the Rue Saint Jacques.  They spent their evenings reciting and listening to romances.

And he added: 

“A newspaper which shall be at the same time a song-book will touch the soul of the people.  People say I have genius.  I do not know whether they are right.  But it must be admitted that I have a practical mind.”

Miss Bell came down the steps, putting on her gloves: 

“Oh, darling, the city and the mountains and the sky wish you to lament your departure.  They make themselves beautiful to-day in order to make you regret quitting them and desire to see them again.”

But Choulette, whom the dryness of the Tuscan climate tired, regretted green Umbria and its humid sky.  He recalled Assisi.  He said: