II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS




[47] Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a "golden
age" and of its return--legends which will hardly be forgotten,
however prosaic the world may become, while man himself remains the
aspiring, never quite contented being he is. And yet in truth, since
we are no longer children, we might well question the advantage of
the return to us of a condition of life in which, by the nature of
the case, the values of things would, so to speak, lie wholly on
their surfaces, unless we could regain also the childish
consciousness, or rather unconsciousness, in ourselves, to take all
that adroitly and with the appropriate lightness of heart. The
dream, however, has been left for the most part in the usual
vagueness of dreams: in their waking hours people have been too busy
to furnish it forth with details. What follows is a quaint legend,
with detail enough, of such a return of a golden or poetically-gilded
age (a denizen of old Greece itself actually finding his way back
again among men) as it happened in an ancient town of medieval
France.

[48] Of the French town, properly so called, in which the products of
successive ages, not without lively touches of the present, are