IntroductionInvitation to the Isles of Happiness
My tresses will remain with you; the flowers are "thoughts": the forget-me-not, the buttercup, the little roses are my childhood and they symbolize it: daisies for the purest and most beautiful character.(Mélanie, Saskia)
So here are the Faeries, captured on the page. But "capture" might be misleading to describe this repository of Beautiful Beings. Let us say it is a book in which they will come and wander. An endless path leading from one world to another, with countless alleyways, resting-places and groves where one can learn to get to know each one better. A ritual passage, a spiritual politeness before the engagement. May each page be "climbed" as a stile would be.
This is only a suggestion, because it is always the Wild Ladies who decide and unwind the distaff of our expectations; for our dreams are only a reflection of the sparkling, efflorescent wreath of their own. But these blossoms of star dust lighting up the paths are enough for a nosegay of wonders gathered in these gardens. Of course, this implies a conquest of the heart, an allegiance to faerie enchantment, and the disappearance of any resistance on our part against falling under the spell of their songs.
Having reached the distant shores, we are met with lights and shadows. To walk with the Faeries is to learn to lose oneself. The imps have contributed greatly to this. They tease and play constantly without keeping count, a generous attitude. And yet, nothing can ever be taken for granted. Without warning, the edges of the forests recede into the distance, the bridge crumbles and words remain suspended for an instant before dissolving, or flying away; but this does not displease them, because words are often on the side of the Faeries.
We believe that they are obedient and amenable, that they will repeat and describe the voices and the images of the unlocked kingdom, that linked together they will weave a passage between the banks; but even a spider's web is far stronger, because words may break up and lose the power of their meaning. I have the impression that I spoke of something very similar when I wrote the introduction to Le Monde des Petites Noblesses. I shall probably do so again, because magic thoughts ricochet repeatedly, sewing their white pebbles along the meandering curves of their course, and repeating themselves until the meaning is only a rumor, a call picked up while listening for an echo.
It might perhaps be desirable to throw these thoughts into "their" petrifying source, in the secret hope that they might acquire a solid form, thus forever fixing a fluctuating mirage into calcareous concretions; but the Nymphea fountain remains hidden from view and it eludes us. To reach it, the only way is to retrace our first childhood footsteps, towards the edge of the original dawns.
It is always possible to come to an arrangement with an imp -- with a fair exchange, for instance, such as a pinch of snuffing exchange for a confidence, a somersault, a witty remark, or a way of dressing; the deal is done and that's that. Apart from angering them, or happening to come across a particularly unpleasant character, a foul-mouthed little midget, sprites are relatively easy to approach, though minor difficulties may always occur. But different qualities are needed when dealing with Faeries. Faerieland cannot be entered by jumping over the fence. It can only be reached through adventure, trials, enchantment, spells, or love. It is a perilous renunciation, a choice that permits no weakness: the "faerie thought" is a completely "different thought." The soul of the visitor is left behind so as to acquire another, but the soul that has been affected by Faeries no longer belongs in the ordinary mortal world. It has to be said that there is no going back...
With Faeries, it is not a matter of making promises; it is a case of a commitment, demanding the making of a vow...
Faeries have witnessed the past, as they bend over the cradle of our slow, clumsy beginnings, tied to their spindle. They preside over our births, they decide our fate and, when the time has come, they cut the thread of our life. Then, when it all seems to have come to an end, they welcome the defunct souls into a Vendoise and take them to be reborn under the golden apple trees of the rediscovered Eden. They are the goddesses of places, the deities of springs, mountains, meadows and woods, the mistresses of our dreams, the Queens of Avalon, the Serpes of the dark, the Nymphs of the dawn, who make and unmake the seasons. But many of these "All-powerful beings," whose names some dare not speak, have the heart of a woman that can be broken by the slightest failure.
People entering these strange lands must respect the terms of the Facrie Wives without asking about the meaning of the ritual. They must accept the hidden secret of the Lady Serpent, Mélusine, and chastely sit at the bedside of their Sleeping Beauty; without disgust they must kiss the ugly snout of a pure princess who has been locked into a hideous appearance by some spell. Otherwise the perjurer will kill the smile of the Lady, more beautiful than any other, and the land that she had charmed will die at the same time as love escapes through the windows of Lusignan. It is impossible to return, it is irretrievable, and the heart grieves at the sight of the wilting flowers, the crumbling towers and the disappearing hills. The earth vanishes and the fall is fatal. All that is left is the dream of a lost paradise, as sparkling as gossamer but just as fragile.
Those who dream of Faeries must know this before allowing themselves to be taken to the Distant Lands whose elusive access is sometimes discouraging...
But henceforth, Lalie has left the door wide open, by anticipating the Faeries' invitation, by becoming one of them. So, she has left the spirit of her braids among the flowers of childhood, as a lost link between this world and the other...
Now between the Petit and Grand Fayt, the banks, the times, and the edges of forests merge into one another; and gardens burst into bloom again as the May Bride passes by...
She came and landed on these pages to read a few sentences over my shoulder, before carrying me off every evening on her starry wings...
Then at the legendary forester's side road the Sabatiers, husband and wife, arrived, more than ever under the Faeries' spell. They have produced ever more inspired drawings in which they have portrayed the Fayolles, endeavoring to understand the fufolian mechanism of a wing, perfecting the lines of the antennules to reflect their extreme elegance, the volutes of a Pillywiggin's flight, scrupulously reproducing the anatomy of a mirageous Lurcette, emphasizing every time the smallest detail and each embroidery stitch. Claudine has embellished Roland's drawings with faerie rainbows. Whether delicate or bright, these colors enhance the images of enchantment where the dresses are flowers, where butterfly petals stand out against the golden turmoil of a dazzling palette.
I thank them both for their great patience.
Pierre Dubois,Elficologist
Origins and genesis of Faerieland Where one learns that one knows nothing about wings...
I do not consider him wise who refuses to believe in the wonders of this world such as faeries...(Jehan d'Arras)
It would be tedious to repeat in detail here the vertiginous maelstrom of the elfin origins of Nordic mythology. These have already been explained elsewhere, and the serious student could with advantage read, re-read, and meditate on La Grande Encyclopédie des Lutins. This tells how the People of the Others were born from the decomposed flesh of the primordial giant, slain by the wild gods. First there was a wriggling of worms to whom Odin gave his face, his magic powers and his habits. The Alfs were born from the somber, icy accumulations of Niflheim, and they then became accustomed to the underground entrails of Svartalfaheimr (a maze of caves, labyrinths and yawning chasms), where they ruled over mines, metals, treasures and obscure sciences. These were the descendants of the black Alfs and Master Blacksmiths -- the Svartalfars who were later to become established at earth's level and in the hills, beneath hillocks and cairns, and in the cellars of houses. The gnomic, kobold, korrigan and imp species are a result of their tempestuous crossbreeding.
The white Alfs, those who burst forth from the dazzling brilliance of Muspelheim (the luminescent side of the Ginungagap), are depressed and weakened by life in the bowels of the earth. All they dream of is to return to the surface of the earth and join the birds.
In contrast to their swarthy cousins who are all shriveled up as a result of digging tunnels, the white Alfs are slender and of a delicate opaline hue. Wings unfold from their shoulders, pointing upwards, and in one burst they can escape into the open. They are the Elves, Siths, the lacteipennean vassalage of the Seelies.
Is it possible that the Faeries could be intermediary creatures of a chiaroscuro, a mutant branch of the Great Ash with its antonomic arborescences of terrestrial roots and celestial crown? That would be like a harsh pruning of the subtle luxuriances of the Dreaming Thought; especially because the dark Dwarf sometimes takes on a luminous appearance, and, in contrast, the white Elf may appear very dark.
Our dear "Numineuses" are extremely complex. That is their most important quality, because the most beautiful creations are born from the fluidity of dawns, crepuscular emotions and the promise of roses. Nothing is said. Everything is to be imagined. It is not that their history is incomplete, but it is deliberately veiled with imaginary, butterfly shapes. Later and further distant, other mirage-like realities will appear from secret pollen, distributed randomly in paraphelian clouds, and from threads of lustrous water.
It is true that ingenious scholars have gone back to the singing source of the genealogies of the water. They have deduced the language of the Weeping-of-the-Banks from the consonance of the reeds, while identifying on wild boughs the suckers of the medieval dialects langue d'oc, and langue d'oïl. They have found Germanic nodules and ancient English nodosities on Latin scions. These findings come from Alfred Maury, Laurence Harf-Lancner and also the spellbinding Claude Lecouteux, master of the archeologies of the marvelous.
First Maury: "Of the various words used by the Gallo-Romans to designate the ancient divinities, only one remained in the memory of the people...this word was fata, in the past a synonym for the Parcae, matroe or matrones; the ancient fata became the Faeries of the regions of the langue d'oïl, the Fadas those of the regions of the langue d'oc, and the Hadas those of Gascony. But one should be careful to make the distinction between the noun "Faerie" and an almost identical adjective. The Latin fatum became fatatus in low Latin, and Faé, then fé in old French, the adjective meaning "destined" and by extension "enchanted."
Then Lancner attempts to clarify the medley of Parcae and rural divinities. Those places inaccessible to men are inhabited by a host of very ancient creatures who live in the forests, the woods and sylvan sanctuaries, lakes, springs and rivers. They are the Pans, Faunus, Fontes, Satyrs, Sylvans, Nymphs, Fatuiis, Fatuae and Faunae. "The god Faunus, who in the primitive religion of the Latin peoples personified the generating force, was also known as Fatuus; while the goddess Fauna or Bona Dea who, according to legend, was his wife, sister and daughter, had powers of divination, hence the name Fatua. Faunus and Fauna, Fatuus and Fatua, have developed into Fauni and Faunae, Fatui and Fatuae, rural divinities who are often confused with Sylvans and Nymphs."
"By linguistic contamination the Tria Fata, the Fatuae and the Gallic mothers -- the matres -- benevolent and feared deities, became connected with cults of fertility, birth and destiny." So this is how the seed of the Faerie took root in the forest of gods...
For Lancner the Faerie is a cross between the Parcae and woodland lovers, to which Lecouteux adds his genesis theory, and his wild women, his nightmarish, noctambulant spinners, the Fates...
As he strolled over the heather at Abbotsford, wondering how this extraordinary court acquired its name, Walter Scott said: "The opinion of scholars is that the Persian word peri, referring to a non-terrestrial being, is the most likely etymology, if we assume that it was introduced into Europe by the Arabs whose alphabet does not have the letter P, so that they pronounced peri as feri." But in fact he did not favor this theory, preferring to associate the Faeries with the more similar sounding word "Fair."
The genesis of obscure raptures
With this field-dew consecrate, Every faerie take his gait...(William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream)
The characters of Great (or classical) Mythology who are too lively to remain immobile as marble statues leave Parnassus for the countryside. As a result of this, the Little Mythology has grown and spread in their wake. Parcae, Hores, Muses, and Nymphs can be seen to mingle at dusk. At dawn, a new maiden will be seen stretching in the crosier of a fern...the start of another story...the rustle of a cult whispered in the ear of a shepherd.
They are also the sacred emanations of the place; they emerge from the filaments of trees and the undulating forms of the flora of rivers and streams; they are born of the earthy pungency of the morning: "The stone, the hill and the mountain are therefore thought of as beings endowed with life, male and female, capable of growing, moving, fighting, copulating, and begetting offspring, and whose substance will be assimilated to a greater or lesser degree into that of a living body. The spirit of the mountain can leave its material body at will, able to take on various shapes and wander along its ridge." So wrote Samivel.
The amazement with which men in that distant past contemplated nature and tried to understand these mysterious transfigurations is merely the embryonic expression of a dormant, intuitive faculty, one that was latent within him: the manifestation of his subconscious. He has a confused glimpse of his surroundings, invisible yet present, active yet concealed, entities whose voices sometimes seem to help him decipher the countless mysteries that surround him. He is aware that the forest is "enchanted" because a tree turns into a beautiful girl who welcomes him and takes him by the hand to the very heart of the Being. "Their world is very different from ours," Yeats said, "and they can only appear as borrowed forms that are within the limits of our awareness. Nevertheless, all the forms take on a particular meaning, as do their actions, and they can be interpreted by an intelligence trained to perceive correspondences between perceptible forms and extra-perceptible meanings." However, the Faerie does not need the clairvoyance of an elect to materialize. While now the soul of a Merlin, poet, fada or elficologist might be needed to perceive them, in those days of the Golden Age when thought was magic, innocent and entranced by the beauty of things, the encounter took place very naturally. So naturally, that the mortal espoused it in spite of damnation by the Church that felt threatened by the sacred shadow of the forest. Until very recently, the "crucifiers" were its executioners. Not so long ago, the fundamentalist knight Gougenot des Mousseaux sent them to stake...
"Exquisite creatures, radiant with youth, endowed with perfect, divine grace. Richly dressed and with an immaterial charm, they resembled ethereal princesses whose feet hardly touched the earth. However, concealed beneath these charms, there lay, more or less hidden, some secret deformity or terrible flaw resulting from their belonging to the Diabolical Beings" (Durville). And yet, it was as a result of the enchantments and noble interventions of these "Beings of passage" that Thomas the Rhymer, the knights of the Middle Ages and the wanderer among theFaeries entered Avalon and the Islands of Wisdom.
At the pale springs of the dawn
I am looking for the key to escape to the lands of our dreams, and perhaps it is death.(Alain-Fournier)
Between good and evil, the archangel and the devil, legend discovers one being. This being is the Faerie.
Between the paradise of Eden and the depths of Hell, legend dreams of a world. This world is inhabited by Faeries.
Between light and darkness, legend creates dusk. This dusk becomes faerieland...With these confused, flashing fragments the Faeries will build a Kingdom of the Dawn...
The Parcae, the Naiads and the wild women have become the queens of orchards planted with the apple trees of eternal youth, of perilous vales, of the "Countries that one never reaches." Time does not exist there. Dead kings have chosen to rest there. Music there is more enchanting than anywhere else. Everything is more beautiful there. But whoever enters this land on a "mad impulse" loses his mortal soul and will not be reborn in celestial havens. That is how it is.
And those who are found wandering on the moors, gray and old with their armor crumbling with rust, they hear only the whispering of the wind. It is said that they know and speak all languages, even the most ancient ones, but the language they are heard to speak is the twittering of birds, the babbling of springs and the sighing of leaves. People who understand this language hear the voice of the gods and of the stars in the sky.
But the kingdom of the gods is very close to the misty regions of death. That is why the monks are constantly clearing groves in their search for the golden doors, destroying in the process the places of "Passage," the intermediary trees, and the large stones on which Faeries gather.
But is their soul as black as the "enchanted one when they kiss him into dark nothingness?" This is what the more moderate scholars wonder as they weigh shadow and light. And popular common sense makes them change their minds, and extrapolate other, less abrupt origins than that of Paradise or Tartarus. If it is recognized that the body and the face are the mirror of the soul, then their very gracious, clear appearance could not -- even by trickery -- conceal such "evil ugliness of heart." Evening stories and courtly deeds record their "kind gestures" most beautifully. One of the beautiful Ondines saved a child from a neighboring village from drowning. They healed Marianne's broken heart by "giving her a Herb," and they led Huon of Bordeaux and Ogier to victory. But they are also regrettably credited with the death of a few herds and flocks. At the edge of dawn and daybreak, inspired peddlers of gargantuan chronicles will copy out the entire imagery of a blue library. It is said, it has been written, it has been repeated that their soul is neither good nor bad but as innocent as that of birds; that they are the dreams of angels who came to tend the landscape at the dawn of time and who let them slip out of their sleep while burying campion flowers; and that fallen angels found mortal women to their taste and impregnated them with Faerie and Siren children.
It is also said that these "guardian creatures, who during their passage on earth had governed and guided primitive societies with their wise counsel, continued, even after their death, to protect those they had guarded during their lifetime. Before returning to this world to inhabit other bodies, these chosen souls traveled to another kingdom where they lived for thousands of years under the transparent guise of phantoms. Female druids on earth, they were Faeries in heaven."
Or perhaps: "When God made celestial beings choose between good and evil, between His kingdom and Satan's, those who did not come to a decision were separated from the angels and the demons to live in a gray limbo. This is why on the day of the Last Judgment Faeries will not be raised from the dead, but will gently fade away like a luminous cloud."
They come and go with the weeping shadows and the dead souls, children who have died before being baptized and pale conspirators. They announce deaths and they wash shrouds, leaving behind them moon trails leading to the banks of the Sidh and the strange bridges to the Other World.
As already mentioned, Faeries undergo a continuous metamorphosis, and they will continue to do so. What seems well-established in one place is crumbling a little further on. A Faerie may seem to be invisible, but she will suddenly appear in the middle of the road. She is thought to be the embodiment of charm and grace, yet she may next appear as a priapic ogre in the whirlwind of a well. She is thought to be material, but as her lover's arms embrace her she becomes a Vendoise fluttering like an elf. Nothing is decided by others. Preceding men at the first light of day, Faeries watch them awaken, embroidering their thoughts and leaving behind those who cling to vain pretensions that do not please them.
They steal little boys -- to the extent that, according to Christian Rolland, the Irish of Inisdoon would dress their boys in girls' clothes and give them girls' names to mislead the Faeries. But these abductions were auspicious and gave those mortals ravished by the Faeries an enchanted soul, while musicians and poets became endowed with the gift of seeing the invisible and conversing with the gods.
To mortal women, endowed with spiritual intuition and the gift of hearing the song of the Tribly in the embers of the fire, they bequeathed the knowledge of the Enchantress, thus enabling them to achieve the "Enchanted Status." It is true that during those centuries when kings thought they were stars, people tried to reduce Faeries to the role of ridiculous "precieuses," keepers of white geese and of starchy princes. But the woodland Will o' the Wisps soon regained their great powers, grassing over the alleys of our false virtues and conducting the restoration of the pruned box to its full glory.
Because it is the first spindle of the Parcae, the distaff of the Spinner, the scepter of the White Queen, the prick of the hazel tree of rural Hades, the stick of the catechesis godmother, the magic rod of the blue Pimpernels of cartoons, for all these reasons the Golden Bough of the Faeries is the divining rod of our imagination and of the live springs of our childhood.
Towards the dazzling glades
All things considered, might not this opening onto the world appropriated by philosophers be a re-opening onto the prestigious world of the earliest contemplations?(Gaston Bachelard)
To dream of Faeries is to return to the dreams of eternal childhood, to the beauty of the earliest images. That is the key to the enchanted ways. That is when they reveal themselves and when some people have seen them. Some have seen them as a miracle, like an appearance of the Virgin, others have seen them without being moved at all, as if it was a rabbit crossing the road, and others have caught a glimpse of them in a moment of grace.
There are those who see Faeries as a natural phenomenon, and those who have looked for them and are still looking. One might be permitted to doubt the sincerity of these clairvoyances. Even though the photographs of the Cottingley Faeries (which so fired Conan Doyle's imagination) were later discovered to be fakes, what of the Faeries of Marjorie Johnson, president of the "Faerie Investigation Society" (4 Brooklands Road, Nottingham), who followed them for so long and with such love? What were they thinking? We shall never know.
Yet Faeries almost always appear to those who conjure them up through intuitions, apparitions, various signs and psychic communications, such as that received by the medium Lucie Piazzo from Luce, the little Faerie: "We serve humanity...we give fragrance to the flowers...we give dazzling colors to the petals...we cure the sick...we come to the help of humans and we do many other things for them." The Faerie guide cannot ignore the works of theosophists, the philosophers of all things astral, and the inspired visionaries who have described them with the greatest care, approaching them, drawing them and trying to record their transcendental messages.
Yeats wrote as follows about the little Faeries of Ireland: "When one first catches sight of them, they seem small but as soon as one has succumbed to their charm they seem as tall as humans. Sometimes, one has the impression that they can take on any shape they like. They generally travel in groups, and if you are kind to them, they will be nice to you too, but if you are unpleasant and short-tempered with them they will be too. They are like beautiful children, extremely charming but without any coherence."
What was it that Daphne Charters, Sir Quentin Crawford, C. W. Leadbetter, Air Marshal Lord Dowding, and especially Geoffrey Hodson observed: "A wide range of ethereal, astral shapes, large and small, working together in an organized cooperation that might be called the 'life' side of nature. In other words, a completely different evolution, simultaneously parallel with and overlapping ours. Popular tradition has always recognized its existence, and all over the world where hearts are pure and spirits simple, stories of the Little People abound."
Hodson watched in amazement as he saw them at work and play: "The grass and trees shudder under the action of minuscule workers whose magnetic bodies work like the matrix that makes the miracles of growth and color possible.
"The Faeries gather round the flower and give it its coloring by vibration. A tune is produced when the flower is in full bloom; if we could hear it, our gardens would bring us even greater joy." Blessed are those who have come under the spell of the Faeries and who hear the sound of the harpsichord produced by the flowering meadows and the immemorial music of the gods...
Along-Faerie paths, the resting place of the soul
What is our country but a dream that we describe to each other leaf by leaf Golden Bough and golden flower Fountain, tree, stream, This invisible Paradise(Kathleen Raine)
We shall see them blossom and disperse. Fundamental spirits of water and air...mother goddesses and local genies, Parcae, Matrones and Sleeping Beauties of the brambles, Ladies of the snowy mountains and Infusion, Swan Maidens on the ruffled moiré of the Lough, Queen of Avalon, pale Weepers on the lunar shore, White Does of the woods, vengeful Margots, Godmothers, Spinners of destiny, Sirens, shadows of the day and rainbows of the night. Singular and plural, they unknot the tangle of snow clouds and wind manes. They watch over childbirth, rites of passage and passionate love. They lead the re-born child to the gates of the Sidh, towards the fields of reviving corn, or they take refuge in the miniature constellations of elderflower umbels.
They have appeared in so many books: in scholarly and religious works, in books on folklore, in popular stories and edifying tales; in Arthurian and fantasy novels; in counting rhymes and yarns; in the wise words of poets and legendary philosophies; in alchemical explorations of the soul and Jungian dreams; in the dowsing research of Marie-Louise Von Franz...the numinous Faeries of our rediscovered distance, embroiderers of babbling synchronisities inserting the seeds of dreams...
Now, at this moment when forgotten wishes may come to mind and be granted, it is time for the wanderer among the Faeries to set out on the road to faerieland and adventure, and perhaps to become lost in meeting them...
© Éditions Hoëbeke, Paris, 1996English translation copyright © 1999 by Pavilion Books Limited
The Pillywiggins
Darling, please do not cut the flowers any more, Janet, why do you cut the rose That looks so beautiful among its leaves, Thus killing the pretty child we have together?(Francis Jammes, Child)
The Pillywiggins have kept their divine authenticity mainly in Scotland and all over England -- except in the Midlands, where they are becoming increasingly rare...
"They have become small and have lost their power, but they are surviving," Lady Trossop wrote in her diary after a long walk "through the topiary garden which hums with their Happy Presence."
It is a fact that English parks and gardens, green relics of the Garden of Eden, are ideal homes for them.
It is in the tranquillity and harmony of the English countryside that the Pillywiggins have chosen to take refuge. There, where the absence of railings and walls allows lawns to merge into the landscape, where branch by branch the rhododendrons naturally become wild again, where the yew tree's broad canopy and sprawling roots reach into the woods...where the ornamental pond leads back to its source, the domesticated duck to the wild teal and the idea of the garden back to its dream...
It is along paths such as these that the "Approaching Being" can catch hold of them...when a walk becomes a timespan with neither beginning nor end.
It is the moment of the "true mirage" when the mist clears before the eyes...allowing the discovery of the realities of the invisible, revealing a luminous path leading to the green, virgin gardens of faerieland tht are sometimes glimpsed through the evanescent layers of the visionary paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. It is at this moment that Arthur Rackham's delightful creatures and Cecily Mary Broker's flower children come to life, humming and fluttering, and the whole enchanted fauna of a wish finally come true becomes tangible.
It is best not to try to describe the extraordinary beauty of Pillywiggins at play in their paradisiac biotope. The most banal setting becomes transformed when touched by the presence of elves! Flower-like creatures, fluid and luminous, fallen from the whimsical crown of gods, born of celestial efflorescences and the sublimation of the elements: cuspidate Vairies from Suffolk, wondrous lilies and plumules from the marshland of Bodmin Moor, the flabellate beaks of the flower-dwelling Culottins demolishing lupulin, long-eared acorneating Patafioles grazing on the green boughs, Farisées with crested craniums nibbling the cerulean carpet of forget-me-nots, Faeries of the flax fields climbing up the tall plants above toothed blades of grass, groups of cheeky Gniafs who, having feasted on clover, now ride on guerliguets in pursuit of the Lawn-Cat beneath the hoops of the nymphs, Feerins from Lancashire, friends of the Sylvanians, tip-toeing on arched feet as a result of trying to reach the bells of hyacinth flowers, minuscule Tiddyfollicoles with small-horned helmets, aristate and downy Processionaries leaving a trail of sparkling arabesques on the green carpet of moss...All these little people, stagnicolous, aerial, small creatures of nettles, of aignail and surcule, of sphagnum moss, musicians of the glassy bells of the dew, young Nymphs of the woodland with sparkling eyes greedily inhaling the scent of wood anemones and primulas, spring flowers whose perfume is so divine that the inebriated senses of the person who sees them are unaware of their intoxication...They vanish as soon as they are glimpsed, leading the observer's spellbound intelligence to doubt this ephemeral yet unforgettable experience...
In an instant the Hotties of Essex turn into green-eyed swallows, the Pillywiggins become toads, pebbles or dragonflies again, the singing of the nymphs sounds merely as the trilling of a finch, and the "Dazzling Vassalerie" becomes a piece of glass shimmering in the evening mist.
"...As the sweetly scented air drifts gently away, only the winding wake of a Pillywiggin's flight remains" (Petrus Barbygère).
© Éditions Hoëbeke, Paris, 1996English translation copyright © 1999 by Pavilion Books Limited