In Paradise: A Novel (Complete)

It was a Sunday in the midsummer of 1869. The air, cleared by a thunderstorm the night before, was still tremulous with that soft, invigorating warmth which, farther south, makes breathing such an easy matter, but which, north of the Alps, seldom outlasts the early morning. And yet the bells, that sounded from the Munich Frauenkirche far across the Theresienwiese, and the field where stands the great statue of Bavaria, were already ringing for high mass. Here, outside the city, there seemed to be no human ear to listen. The great bronze maiden stood there in the deepest solitude, holding her wreath above her head, and with a mazed and dreamy look, as though she might be thinking whether this were not an opportune moment to step down from her granite pedestal, and to wander at will through the town, that to-day raised its towers and roofs like a city of the dead above the bare green plain. Now and then a bird flew out of the little grove behind the Ruhmes-halle, and fluttered about the shoulders of the giant maiden, or rested for a moment on the mane of the lion that sat lazily listening, pressed close to the knee of his great mistress. But away in the city the bells rang on. The air grew drowsy with the steadily increasing heat, with the hum and the vibration of the distant ringing, and the strong fragrance that rose from the meadow, which had been mown the day before. At last the bells ceased; and now not a sound was to be heard, save that there came from a house in one of the outer streets the sound of a flute, played by fits and starts, as though the player stopped for breath between the passages, or as though he forgot his notes in other thoughts