"Marie-Louise!" cried Jean Laparde aloud--and the wind seemed to catch up the words and echo them in a triumphant shout: "Marie-Louise!"
It was gone--that mood. And now, with the village well behind him, the lights blotted out and seeming to have left him isolated even from human proximity, another came--and he stood still--and this time it was the storm. And something within him, without will or volition of his, spontaneous, leapt out in consonance with the wild grandeur of the night to revel in it, atune with the Titanic magnificence of the spectacle, as one who gazes upon a splendid canvas and, innate in appreciation, is lost in the conception to which the master brush has given life. And so he stood there for a long time immovable, his shoulders thrust a little forward, the rain streaming from his face, his eyes afire, wrapt, lost in the clashing elements before him--and fancy came. The play of the lightning was more vivid now, and the coast line took on changing shapes, as though seeking by new and swiftly conceived formations to foil and combat and thrust back and parry the furious attack of the breakers that hurled themselves onward in their mad, never-ending charge; while behind again, in sudden apparitions, like spectre battalions massed in reserve, the white cottages appeared for an instant, and then, as though seeking a more strategic position, vanished utterly, until a flame-tongue crackling across the heavens searched them out again, laying their position bare once more; and the headlands, vanguards where the fight was hottest, were lost in a smother of spume and spray, like the smoke of battle swirling over them--and it was battle, and the thunder of the surf was the thunder of belching cannon, and the shriek of the wind was the shriek of hurtling shells. It was battle--and some consciousness inborn in Jean Laparde awakened and filled him with understanding, and in the terror; and dismay and awe and strife and fierce elation was the great allegory of life, and suddenly he knew a lowly reverence for Him who had depicted this, and a joy, full of a strange indefinable yearning, in the divine genius of its execution.
"It is the great art of the _bon Dieu_," said Jean simply.