Read "Penguin Island Book I" by Anatole France online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Orberosia loved her husband, but she did not love him alone. At the hour when Venus lightens in the pale sky, whilst Kraken scattered terror through the villages, she used to visit in his moving hut, a young shepherd of Dalles called Marcel, whose pleasing form was invested with inexhaustible vigour. The fair Orberosia shared the shepherd's aromatic couch with delight, but far from making herself known to him, she took the name of Bridget, and said that she was the daughter of a gardener in the Bay of Divers. When regretfully she left his arms she walked across the smoking fields towards the Coast of Shadows, and if she happened to meet some belated peasant she immediately spread out her garments like great wings and cried:
"Passer by, lower your eyes, that you may not have to say, ‘Alas! alas! woe is me, for I have seen the angel of the Lord."