I pass wells coiffed in wrought-iron equipments, and wells that begin in obscure gutters, their portals prudently hatched, and roads that one refers to with syllables of wells, and villages named after the same. Et la-bas un lavoir s'étale, se pousse; grotto within, where swim the sirens of women doing the laundry. They occupied a small farm whose colombier alone attested to their nobility: a citadel lost in the boxwoods, hatched expanse of pigeon-holes, ladder helix, mobile on spiked axis: a sort of apse that has lost the body of its christ. Wiser and happier than I, they have remained in sight of the towers of the chateau I left thirty years ago. I pass windmills: there, yonder in ruins on colline among fertile ashy clods; there, next to the road, freshly and hopefully rigged and roofed, lacking sails but furnished with all necessary hooks, resting lightly in the faery-ring of its rotation.