The Secret Orchard (Paperback)

1900. Begins: Silver and gold lay the landscape beneath the terrace of the Chateau de Fitzroy, this golden month of September, this golden hour of the afternoon. The fields of La Celle bathed in sunlight, the wooded slopes of St. Michel and Marly already autumn yellow, melted into the delicate hazes of the valley where the Seine shimmered distantly, stream of burnished silver between the dim silver of its banks. In the far background, just substantial against the unsubstantial sky line, poised like the last fantastic touch of a romantic painter, rose the ruined arches of Marly aqueduct-that crowning extravagance of the Roy-Soleil. It completed a picture which in its exquisite unreality, its warmth and glow, its richness, its stillness, seemed like the dream of a Claude Lorraine, expressed by that past-mistress of all art, living Nature herself.