This might eventually require a very long note, but work is madder even than usual, so, in the meantime, as I've just re-read it again:

Green leaves throughout the room are shaking — not with fear (not that they have ever felt fear; they’re spoiled rotten) but as if the earthquake within him has set invisible waves slowly rippling

From somewhere in Les misérables, the original Marius and Cosette scene, long before the musical:

La végétation lascive et vigoureuse tressaillait pleine de sève et d’ivresse autour de ces deux innocents, et ils disaient des paroles d’amour dont les arbres frissonnaient.

which, er. Also a bit out of practice at French. “The greenery, strong and wanton, shivered, full of life and intoxication, around those two innocents, as they spoke words of love that made the trees tremble.” (Unimaginably more elegant in the original.)

And … it was an idea, a totem, a thing I'd carried and delighted in and wondered about for years, and you actually made it incarnately happen, and part of the point of it was that it was impossible, a metaphor, a fairy-story, and there it is, made flesh, or, I suppose, leaf, in the real world, and … how is this even a thing that can be done?

Er. More coherent and carefully footnoted thoughts might at some point follow, but, in the meantime, thank you. Again.