Chapter II
During breakfast I had many opportunities to appreciate the good taste,tact, and intelligence of Madame de Gabry, who told me that thechateau had its ghosts, and was especially haunted by the"Lady-with-three-wrinkles-in-her-back," a prisoner during her lifetime,and thereafter a Soul-in-pain. I could never describe how much wit andanimation she gave to this old nurse's tale. We took out, coffee onthe terrace, whose balusters, clasped and forcibly torn away from theirstone coping by a vigorous growth of ivy, remained suspended in thegrasp of the amorous plant like bewildered Athenian women in the arms ofravishing Centaurs.
The chateau, shaped something like a four-wheeled wagon, with a turretat each of the four angles, had lost all original character by reason ofrepeated remodellings. It was merely a fine spacious building, nothingmore. It did not appear to me to have suffered much damage during itsabandonment of thirty-two years. But when Madame de Gabry conducted meinto the great salon of the ground-floor, I saw that the planking wasbulged in and out, the plinths rotten, the wainscotings split apart, thepaintings of the piers turned black and hanging more than half out oftheir settings. A chestnut-tree, after forcing up the planks of thefloor, had grown tall under the ceiling, and was reaching out itslarge-leaved branches towards the glassless windows.
This spectacle was not devoid of charm; but I could not look at itwithout anxiety as I remembered that the rich library of Monsieur Honorede Gabry, in an adjoining apartment, must have been exposed for thesame length of time to the same forces of decay. Yet, as I looked at theyoung chestnut-tree in the salon, I could not but admire the magnificentvigour of Nature, and that resistless power which forces every germto develop into life. On the other hand I felt saddened to think that,whatever effort we scholars may make to preserve dead things frompassing away, we are labouring painfully in vain. Whatever has livedbecomes the necessary food of new existences. And the Arab who buildshimself a hut out of the marble fragments of a Palmyra temple is reallymore of a philosopher than all the guardians of museums at London,Munich, or Paris.