WHAT a wonderful day! The vast park lies swooning under the sun's burning eye, like youth under Love's dominion.

Not a sound gives voice to the universal ecstacy of things; even the waters seem to he asleep. Quite unlike human holidays, this is an orgy of silence.

It is as though an ever more luminous light kept making each object glitter with an ever more dazzling splendor; as though the frenzied flowers were trying to rival the azure of the sky by the intensity of their colors, as though the heat, making the perfumes visible, were drawing them up to the sun like smoke.

Yet, in the midst of all this universal joy I caught sight of a grief-stricken soul.

At the feet of a colossal Venus, all of a heap against the pedestal, one of those so-called fools, those voluntary buffoons who, with cap and bells and tricked out in a ridiculous and gaudy costume, are called upon to make kings laugh when they are beset by Boredom or Remorse, raises his tear-filled eyes toward the immortal Goddess.

And his eyes say: "I am the least and the loneliest of men, deprived of love and friendship, wherein I am inferior even to the lowest animals. Yet I, too, am made to understand and to feel immortal Beauty! Ah! Goddess! take pity on my fever and my pain!"

But the implacable Goddess with her marble eyes continues to gaze into the distance, at I know not what.