The second chapter finds Cosimo still in the holm oak the morning following that fateful evening. The Generalessa has gotten over her initial panic, and she and the Baron decide to take a nonchalant …show more content…
stroll through the garden so they might ignore Cosimo and thereby antagonize him out of the trees.
The most helpful affect of their stroll is that it allows Biagio to lay out the geography of the trees into which Cosimo has climbed. The trees, because they are mature and growing so close together, enable Cosimo to pass easily from one to the next. An adept climber, he spies quite happily on all of the goings-on below him. The Abbe Fauchelefleur passes below is too distracted to notice Cosimo tossing bits of nature down at him from his perch. Chapter three contains the account of Biagio's first venture up into the trees to visit his brother, as well as the beginning of his understanding that Cosimo does not intend to return to life on the ground any time soon. He enters by way of the mulberry with an offering of pie. He assures Cosimo that he stole the pie under his own initiative and that he was not sent with it by any of the grown-ups. He
apologizes heartily for his lapse in solidarity with his brother and assures him that the meal of snails was wretched, explaining he simply could not endure the scolding. Cosimo begins, upon softening, to describe the exotic garden he has discovered over the brick wall, and Biagio asks if he could please be allowed to come on..... In chapter four, the world of trees into which Cosimo has climbed grows in the reader's perspective from covering their yard and the neighbors' to reaching well beyond even Ombrossa. As Cosimo bragged to Viola, they stretch from Rome to Spain throughout all of the countryside between. Biagio laments the loss of that thick and ancient cover of trees in the years since he watched his brother in the trees, and blames the French invasion for the transformation of the European countryside. In a hypnotically lovely set of paragraphs, he describes in palpable detail the varieties of trees and thickness with which they filled the sky.
Cosimo, he explains, is the first to really delve into the possible mobility this lush collection of trees provide. He describes the strategy and skill with which.....
Chapter five opens with a return to the briefly introduced Sinforosa. She is revealed as a little girl from the villas who rode a white horse and commanded and protected the little band of boys. She told them where the ripe fruit was, and blew a horn around her neck when they were going to be discovered. She betrayed the boys, however, turning two of her favorites against her when she revealed them to her servants to be beaten. Upon asking, his suspicion that this mysterious and treacherous creature is his friend from the swing, Viola, is confirmed, and Cosimo determines that the best course is to perform some feat of daring that might reach her ears indirectly.
Meanwhile, his father's dismay continues to grow to the point that he scolds the Abbe for.....