THE
WOOLLEN DRESS

TO PIERRE LOTI

In dedicating to you this story of “The Woollen Dress,” Idischarge a very old debt, a debt of my youth, when enthusiasm for yourworks—your poems, I ought rather to call them—flushed andexalted me as the first misty moments of the dawn suffuse the surface ofthe earth.

With what magic did you not gild our adolescent years! We were at thespoiled age of twenty, at the threshold of life’s work, when one armsone’s self against love, and indulges in yearnings for universal thingswhich only later, alike with him who has lived too much and him who hasnot lived at all, accept their limitations and disenchantments;—wewere twenty, and we found in you that melancholy which at twenty it isso sweet to breathe.

This book is the story of a quite simple young girl crushed by thecruelties of our modern life. When I hear children singing that oldround, which I am sure you loved as well as I,

I picture Claudine, Suzanne, Dumaine and their companions as a gracefulchorus in which the voices of old France still sound. I call themby name and they come to me from all the provinces,—Sylvia fromValois and Marie from Brittany, the little Fadette from Berry, humbleGenevieve from Dauphiné, and from Aunis that little Madeleine, whosefeet tread the same crooked path where later Dominique must pass, drawnback by sorrow to his native land, “like an animal wounded and bleedingwho yet knows his way home.” Here, too, are Mireille and Nerte, glowingwith the sun of Provence, Gracieuse from Basque, and Colette from Metz.

In the field they were only ten. Can they not take by the hand a littlesister who has such need of their protection, this Raymonde, that Ihave gathered from Savoy, who would like so much to join their game ifshe could do so without intrusion?

H. B.

CHALET DU MAUPAS, September 20, 1910.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I THE SLEEPING WOODS
II AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES
III THE FACE OF THIS WORLD CHANGES

PART I

THE SLEEPING WOODS

AMAZED, enraptured, I gazed about me. This, surely, was the very forestof the Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. Suddenly, at a turn of the road,her castle loomed up among the trees, huge and mysterious.

I had been pushing my bicycle, despite its various gears, up a longheavy slope.

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