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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Marguerite
+       1921
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Illustrator: Simeon
+
+Translator: J. Lewis May
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25406]
+Last Updated: October 5, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGUERITE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE
+
+By Anatole France
+
+Translated From The French By J. Lewis May
+
+With Twenty-Nine Original Woodcuts By Simeon
+
+London, John Lane Company, MCMXXI
+
+
+[Illustration: titlepage 010]
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY LETTER
+
+Publish Marguerite, dear Monsieur André Coq, if you so desire, but pray
+relieve me from all responsibility in the matter.
+
+It would argue too much literary conceit on my part were I anxious to
+restore it to the light of day. It would argue, perhaps, still more did
+I endeavour to keep it in obscurity. You will not succeed in wresting it
+for long from the eternal oblivion where-unto it is destined. Ay me, how
+old it is! I had lost all recollection of it. I have just read it over,
+without fear or favour, as I should a work unknown to me, and it does
+not seem to me that I have lighted upon a masterpiece. It would ill
+beseem me to say more about it than that. My only pleasure as I read it
+was derived from the proof it afforded that, even in those far-off days,
+when I was writing this little trifle, I was no great lover of the Third
+Republic with its pinchbeck virtues, its militarist imperialism, its
+ideas of conquest, its love of money, its contempt for the handicrafts,
+its unswerving predilection for the unlovely. Its leaders caused me
+terrible misgivings. And the event has surpassed my apprehensions.
+
+But it was not in my calculations to make myself a laughing-stock, by
+taking Marguerite as a text for generalizations on French politics of
+the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+
+The specimens of type and the woodcuts you have shown me promise a very
+comely little book.
+
+Believe me, dear Monsieur Coq,
+
+Yours sincerely,
+
+Anatole France.
+
+La Béchellerie, 16th April, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE
+
+[Illustration: 018]
+
+
+
+
+5th July
+
+As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five o’clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
+my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
+gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper
+an invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the
+direction of the Champs-Elysées, victorias and landaus kept rolling by.
+In the shadow of the lowered carriage-hoods, women’s faces gleamed clear
+and radiant and I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by
+like hopes vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman
+as she passed by left me with an impression of light and perfume.
+I think a man, if he is wise, will not ask much more than that of a
+beautiful woman. A gleam and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even
+less behind it. Moreover, that day, if Fortune herself had run with her
+wheel a-spinning before my very nose along the pavement of the Pont
+de la Concorde, I should not have so much as stretched forth an arm to
+pluck her by her golden hair. I lacked nothing that day; all was mine.
+It was five o’clock and I was free till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free
+to saunter at will, to breathe at my ease for two hours, to look on at
+things and not have to talk, to let my thoughts wander as I listed. All
+was mine, I say again. My happiness was making me a selfish man. I
+gazed at everything about me as though it were all a picture, a splendid
+moving pageant, arranged for my own particular delectation. It seemed
+to me as though the sun were shining for me alone, as though it were
+pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my special
+gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
+swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
+destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the
+people about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an
+illusion, that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has
+when he has nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that
+score with a poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten
+years on end with politics and law making and is wearing away his life
+with those trivial preoccupations men call affairs of state.
+
+In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
+colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
+ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
+from the printer’s and all smelling of printer’s ink, conversations
+in green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
+speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one
+things, the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the
+grey and gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the
+purple hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night;
+tasks which leave you no soul to call your own and rob you of the
+consciousness of your own identity.
+
+Yes, it is so. I have left my own _ego_ behind me there. It is scattered
+up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports. Industrious junior
+clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of their beautiful green
+filing cases. And so I have had to go on living without my _ego_,
+which, moreover, is how all politicians have to live. But an _ego_ is a
+strangely subtle thing. And wonder of wonders! mine came back to me just
+now on the Pont de la Concorde. ‘Twas he without a doubt and, would
+you believe it, he had not suffered so very much from his sojourn among
+those musty papers. The very moment he arrived I found myself again, I
+recognized my own existence, whereof I had not been conscious these
+ten years. “Ha ha!” said I to myself, “since I exist, I am just as well
+pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now to improve this
+new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover’s thoughts in my heart, down
+the Champs-Elysées.”
+
+And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured
+steeds of Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds
+themselves; this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance
+is marked by their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The
+carriages flow past endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of
+lava or molten asphalt, whereon the hats of the women seem borne along
+like so many flowers, and like everything else one sees in Paris, at
+once extravagant and pretty. I light up a cigar and looking at nothing,
+behold everything. So intense is my joy that it scares me. It is the
+first cigar I have smoked for ten years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun
+as many as ten a day in my room; but those I scorched, bit, chewed and
+threw away; I never smoked them. This one I am really and truly smoking
+and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of poesy spreading grace and charm
+about it. What an interest I take in all I see. These little shops,
+which display at regular intervals their motley assortment of wares,
+fill me with delight. Here especially is one which I cannot forbear
+stopping to look at. What I chiefly delight to contemplate there is a
+decanter with lemonade in it. The decanter reflects in miniature on its
+polished sides the trees around it and the women that pass by and the
+skies. It has a lemon on the top of it which gives it a sort of oriental
+air. However, it is not its shape nor its colour that is the attraction
+in my eyes; I cannot keep my gaze from it because it reminds me of
+my childhood. At the sight of it, innumerable delightful scenes come
+thronging into my memory. Once again do I behold those shining hours,
+those hours divine of early childhood. Ah, what would I not give to be
+again the little boy of those days and to drink once more a glass of
+that precious liquid!
+
+[Illustration: 024]
+
+In that little shop, I find once more, besides the lemonade and the
+gooseberry syrup, all those divers things wherein my childhood took
+delight. Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches,
+belts, scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five
+to nine years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of
+a Napoleon. I played that mighty rôle, in my tenpenny soldier’s kit,
+I played it from start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of
+exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured
+prints from Épinal. It was on them that I began to spell out those signs
+which to the learned reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle.
+Yes, the sorriest little coloured daub that ever came out of a village
+in the Vosges consists of print and pictures, and what is the sum and
+substance of Science after all but just pictures and print?
+
+From those Épinal prints I learned things far finer and more useful
+than anything I ever got from the little grammar and history books my
+schoolmasters gave me to pore over. Épinal prints, you see, are stories,
+and stories are mirrors of destiny. Blessed is the child that is brought
+up on fairy-tales. His riper years should prove rich in wisdom and
+imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story _The Blue Bird_. I
+know him by his outspread tail. ‘Tis he right enough. It is as much as
+I can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman’s
+neck and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt
+I owe him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to
+him. Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of
+the Blue Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and
+parliamentary documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect
+then that the human soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable
+metamorphoses and hallowed sorrows, and if, under the spell of such
+thoughts, I gave to the clause I chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a
+humaner sense, an added respect for the soul and its rights, and for
+the universal order of things, that clause would never fail to encounter
+vigorous opposition in the Chamber. The counsels of the Blue Bird seldom
+prevailed in the committee stage. Howbeit some did manage to get through
+Parliament.
+
+I now perceive that I am not the only one inspecting the little stall:
+a little girl has come to a halt in front of the brilliant display. I
+am looking at her from behind. Her long, bright hair comes tumbling in
+cascades from under her red velvet hood and spreads out on her broad
+lace collar and on her dress, which is the same colour as her hood.
+Impossible to say what is the colour of her hair (there is no colour so
+beautiful) but one can describe the lights in it; they are bright and
+pure and changing, fair as the sun’s rays, pale as a beam of starlight.
+Nay, more than that, they shine, yes; but they flow also. They possess
+the splendour of light, and the charm of pleasant waters. Methinks that,
+were I a poet, I should write as many sonnets on those tresses as M.
+José Maria de Heredia composed concerning the Conquerors of Castille
+d’Or. They would not be so fine, but they would be sweeter. The child,
+so far as I can judge, is between four and five years old. All I can see
+of her face is the tip of her ear, daintier than the daintiest jewel,
+and the innocent curve of her cheek. She does not stir; she is holding
+her hoop in her left hand; her right is at her lips as though she were
+biting her nails in her eager contemplation. What is it she is gazing
+at so longingly? The shop contains other things besides the arms and the
+gear of fighting men. Balls and skipping ropes are suspended from the
+awning. On the stall are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard,
+smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little
+six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms,
+little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them
+a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has
+no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips
+of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. He
+is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth all by himself. He
+dominates, he effaces everything else. Once you have beheld him, you see
+naught else save him.
+
+Bolt upright in his warm wraps, a little swansdown tucker under his
+chin, he is stretching out his little chubby arms for some one to take
+him. He speaks straight to the little maid’s heart. He appeals to her
+by every maternal instinct she possesses. He is enchanting. His face has
+three little dots, two black ones for the eyes, and one red one for the
+mouth. But his eyes speak, his mouth invites you. He is alive.
+
+Philosophers are a heedless race. They pass by dolls with never a
+thought. Nevertheless the doll is more than the statue, more than the
+idol. It finds its way to the heart of woman, long ere she be a woman.
+It gives her the first thrill of maternity. The doll is a thing august.
+Wherefore cannot one of our great sculptors be so very kind as to take
+the trouble to model dolls whose lineaments, coming to life beneath his
+fingers, would tell of wisdom and of beauty?
+
+At last the little girl awakens from her silent day-dream. She turns
+round and shows her violet eyes made bigger still with wonder, her nose
+which makes you smile to look at it, her tiny nose, quite white, that
+reminds you of a little pug dog’s black one, her solemn mouth, her
+shapely but too delicate chin, her cheeks a shade too pale. I recognize
+her. Oh yes! I recognize her with that instinctive certainty that is
+stronger than all convictions supported by all the proofs imaginable. Oh
+yes, ‘tis she, ‘tis indeed she and all that remains of the most charming
+of women. I try to hasten away but I cannot leave her. That hair of
+living gold, it is her mother’s hair; those violet eyes, they are her
+mother’s own; Oh, child of my dreams, child of my despair! I long to
+gather you to my arms, to steal you, to bear you away.
+
+But a governess draws near, calls the child and leads her away: “Come,
+Marguerite, come along, it’s time to go home.”
+
+And Marguerite, casting a look of sad farewell at the baby with its
+outstretched arms, reluctantly follows in the footsteps of a tall woman
+clad in black with ostrich feathers in her hat.
+
+[Illustration: Endpiece 033]
+
+
+[Illustration: 034]
+
+
+
+
+10th July
+
+“Jean, bring me file 117.... Now then, M. Boscheron, let’s get this
+circular done. Take this down: _I draw your special attention, M. le
+Préfet, to the following point. An end must be put at the earliest
+possible moment to an abuse which, if suffered to continue, would tend
+to--tend to--I draw your special attention to the following point, M. le
+Préfet. An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse_. Take that
+down, M. Boscheron.”
+
+But M. Boscheron, my secretary, respectfully remarks that I keep on
+dictating the same sentence. Jean deferentially places a file on my
+table.
+
+“What’s that, Jean?”
+
+“File number 117. You asked me to fetch it, sir.”
+
+“I asked you for file number 117?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+Jean gives me an anxious glance and retires.
+
+“Where were we, M. Boscheron?”
+
+“An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse . . . .”
+
+“That’s right... _an abuse which would tend to diminish popular respect
+for government servants and to transform_... transform, what a wealth
+of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it
+but a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade
+the secret recesses of my being.” “I beg pardon, monsieur?” “What did
+you say, M. Boscheron?” “Please repeat, monsieur; I didn’t quite follow
+you.”
+
+“Really, Monsieur Boscheron? Possibly I was not very clear. Well, well!
+we will stop there if you like. Give me what I have dictated, I will
+finish it myself.”
+
+[Illustration: 036]
+
+M. Boscheron gives me his notes, gathers up his papers, bows and
+retires. Left alone in my office, I fall to examining the wallpaper with
+a sort of idiotic minuteness. It has the appearance of green felt with
+here and there a yellow stain; I begin to draw little men on my paper;
+I make an effort to write; for the fact is my Chief has asked for the
+circular three times and has promised the government deputies that it
+shall go to the prefects forthwith. I am bound to let him have it. I
+begin reading it through: _to diminish popular respect for government
+servants and to transform them_. I make a blot; then with my pen I
+adorn it with hair. I transform it into a comet. I dream of Marguerite’s
+tresses. The other day, in the Champs-Elysées, little filaments of gold,
+little delicate spirals stood out from the rest of her graceful tresses,
+with a singular brightness. You can see their like in fifteenth century
+miniatures, also in some of an earlier date. Dante says in his _Vita
+Nuova_: “One day when I was busy drawing angel’s heads . . .” And now
+here am I trying to draw angels’ heads on a government circular. Come
+now, we must get on with it: _government servants and to transform
+them--transform them_ . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single
+word after that? How is it I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever
+since I rediscovered my _ego_ on the Pont de la Concorde that evening
+of the lovely sunset? Transform, did I say? O God of mystery, nature,
+truth, if she whose name even now after four years I dare not utter, if
+she died in giving life to Marguerite, I should believe, I should know
+with the certainty of instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed
+into the daughter and that they are one and the same being.
+
+[Illustration: 040]
+
+
+[Illustration: 042]
+
+
+
+
+1st November
+
+All’s well. I have lost my _ego_ again. It has gone back into the green
+filing cases. Number 117 contains a good part of it. I have finished my
+circular. It is drawn up in good official style. We have a fine piece of
+legislation to get off before the holidays. My Chief speaks every day in
+the House. Every night I correct the proofs of his speeches. If the
+Blue Bird comes to see me now and again in the small hall of the Palais
+Bourbon, it is merely to advise me to tone down some rather too forcible
+expression and he never addresses himself to my imagination. I don’t
+know whether I am living happily or unhappily since I don’t know that
+I am living at all. I do not even recognize my own clothes. I picked up
+the hat of the Comte de Mérodac a little while ago and wore it for three
+days without knowing it, yet it is a romantic sombrero-like
+sort of thing worn nowadays by no one save this elderly nobleman. I cut
+an astounding figure they told me, but I never noticed myself, and,
+if by chance I had, I should not have heeded what I saw since it had
+nothing to do with politics. I am no longer a person; I am a piece of
+the official machine. To-night I have neither proofs to correct nor
+official reception to attend. I have put on my slippers. There is always
+a tiny bit of my _ego_ hidden away in these slippers. I am in my room
+seated by the fire and I am conscious of being there. By heaven I wonder
+whether I should know myself in the glass. Let’s have a look. Hum! not
+so very ... I didn’t think I was so grave and respectable looking. I
+quite see that I shall have to take myself seriously. I have been a long
+time about it, but then it wasn’t for me to begin.
+
+I am a man of weight and I account myself such. But, alas, I do not know
+myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
+tedious business. No, I haven’t the smallest desire to hold converse
+with the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the
+other hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that
+little fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against
+the frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a
+nice little chap. I feel like calling him and saying “Let’s go and have
+a game together shall we?” But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That
+little boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead
+as if I were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For
+what have we in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me
+to-day? In what do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?
+
+We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
+over again.
+
+[Illustration: 046]
+
+I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
+time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
+with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
+adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
+battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart
+like a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to
+soothe all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the
+child that I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me;
+I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without
+unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my
+innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in
+swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding
+life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of
+irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not
+already been delved within her, though she is but five years old. I,
+a stranger, a passer-by, know more of her life than she does and, in
+consequence, I am more truly she than she herself. After that let him
+who will prate of the feeling of identity and the consciousness of self.
+
+Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss
+of terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
+instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
+slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they
+have called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are
+only bearable provided we do not think about them.
+
+[Illustration: 049]
+
+
+[Illustration: 050]
+
+
+
+
+5th July
+
+It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front
+of a toyshop in the Champs-Elysées, the child of her who first awakened
+in me the sense of beauty.
+
+I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was
+unknown to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love.
+The first time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert
+to which her father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had
+heard the finest orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her
+attired in stately weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only
+served to accentuate her radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in
+me feelings which bore, I think, a close resemblance to religious
+exaltation. I was no longer very young. The uncertainty of my worldly
+position, dependent as it then was upon the vicissitudes of a political
+party, combined with my natural timidity to deprive me of all hope of
+figuring as a successful suitor. I often saw her at her father’s and she
+treated me with an air of open friendliness that did not encourage me to
+foster higher ambitions. It was clear I did not impress her as the sort
+of man with whom she could fall in love. As for me, the sight of her
+and the sound of her voice produced in me such a state of delicious
+agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled though it be with grief,
+still avails to make me in love with life.
+
+[Illustration: 052]
+
+Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her
+always; I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain
+to wed her. No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my
+heart. “It was not love then,” some one will say. I know not what it
+was, but I know that it filled my soul.
+
+Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange
+to the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
+sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
+They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
+break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
+remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life;
+then, one day, she told me she was going to be married. My feelings, as
+I have said, bear a strong resemblance to religious emotion. They
+are sad, but in their sadness they still preserve their charm. Grief
+corrupts them not. From suffering they derive a wholesome bitterness
+that lends them strength. I listened to her with that gentle courage
+which comes with renunciation. She was marrying a man senior to myself,
+a widower, almost an old man, whose birth and fortune had marked him
+out for the public career in which he had displayed a haughtiness of
+disposition and much misplaced courage. Although I moved in a lower
+sphere, I came in contact with him on several important occasions. I
+belonged to a political group with views very similar to his own, but we
+had never been able to meet without considerable friction and, although
+the newspapers treated us with the same approval or, as was more often
+the case, with the same hostility, we were not friends, far from it, and
+we avoided each other with sedulous care.
+
+I was present at the wedding. I saw, and I shall ever see Marie, wearing
+her white dress and lace veil. She was a little pale and very lovely. I
+was struck, without apparent reason, by the impression of fragility with
+which this girl who was animated by so poetic a soul seemed to give one.
+This impression, which I think occurred to no one but myself, was only
+too well founded. I never saw Marie again.
+
+She died after three years of married life, leaving a little girl ten
+months old. An indescribable feeling of tender affection has always
+drawn me to this child, to Marie’s Marguerite. An unconquerable desire
+to see her took possession of me.
+
+She was being brought up at ------ near Melun, where her father had a
+château standing in the midst of a magnificent park. One day I went to
+------ and wandered for hours, like a thief, about the park bound-aries.
+At last, through a gap in the trees, I caught sight of Marguerite in the
+arms of her nurse, who was dressed in black. She was wearing a hat with
+white plumes and an embroidered pelisse. I cannot say in what respect
+she differed from any other child, but I thought she was the fairest
+in the world. It was autumn. The wind that was sighing in the trees
+was whirling the dead leaves about in little eddies as they floated
+to earth. Dead leaves covered all the long avenue in which the little
+white-robed child was being carried up and down. An immense sadness
+took possession of me. At the edge of a bed of flowers as white as the
+raiment of Marguerite, an old gardener who was gathering up the fallen
+leaves saluted his little mistress with a smile and, with his hand on
+his rake and hat in hand, spoke to her with the gentle gaiety of old men
+who are not overburdened with their thoughts. But she paid no heed to
+him. With her little hand like to a star she sought her nurse’s breast.
+As I hurried away with grief in my heart, the nurse resumed her walk
+and I heard the sound of the dead leaves sighing sorrowfully beneath her
+steps.
+
+[Illustration: 058]
+
+
+[Illustration: 060]
+
+
+
+
+10th July
+
+The President of the Chamber rises and says: “The motion proposed by
+Messrs. ------ and ------ is now put.”
+
+The Prime Minister, without quitting his seat says: “The Government does
+not assent to the motion.”
+
+The President rings his bell and says: “A ballot has been demanded. A
+ballot will therefore be taken. Those in favour of Messrs. ------ and
+------‘s motion must place a white paper in the urn; those who are
+against it, a blue paper.”
+
+There was a great movement in the hall. The deputies poured out in a
+disorderly mob into the corridors, while the ushers passed the white
+metal urn along the tiers of seats. The corridors were full of the
+sound of shuffling feet, and of shouting and gesticulating people. Grave
+looking young men and excited old ones went passing by. The air was
+pierced with the sound of voices calling out figures:
+
+“Eleven votes.”
+
+“No, nine.”
+
+“They are being checked.”
+
+“Eight against.”
+
+“No, not at all; eight for.”
+
+“What, the amendment is carried?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“The Government is beaten?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+The President’s bell is heard in the corridors.
+
+Slowly the hall fills again.
+
+The President standing up with a paper in his hand rings his bell for
+the last time and says:
+
+“The following is the result of the ballot on the motion proposed by
+Messrs. ------ and ------. Number of votes 470; for the motion 239 ;
+against 231. The motion is carried.”
+
+There is an immense sensation. The Ministers get up and leave their
+seats. Two or three friends shake them timidly by the hand. It’s all
+over, they are beaten. They go under and I with them. I no longer count.
+I make up my mind to it. To say that I am happy would be to go too
+far. But it spells the end of my worries and bothers and toils. I have
+regained my freedom, but not voluntarily. Repose and liberty, I’ve got
+them back again, but it is to my defeat that I owe them. An honourable
+defeat it is true, but painful all the same because our ideas suffer
+with ourselves. How many things are involved in our fall, alas.
+Economy, public security, tranquillity of conscience and that spirit of
+prudence, that continuity of policy, which gives a nation its strength.
+I hurried away to shake hands with the Chief of my department, proud of
+having rendered faithful service to so upright a leader. Then, pushing
+my way through the crowd that had gathered about the precincts of the
+Palais Bourbon, I crossed the Seine and made my way slowly towards the
+Madeleine. At the top of the boulevard there was a barrow of flowers
+drawn up alongside the kerb. Between the two shafts was a young girl
+making up bunches of violets. I went up to her and asked her for a
+bunch. I then saw a little girl of four sitting on the barrow amid the
+flowers. With her baby fingers she was trying to make bunches like her
+mother. She raised her head at my approach and, with a smile, held out
+all the flowers she had in her hands. When she had given them all to me,
+she blew kisses.
+
+[Illustration: 064]
+
+I was extremely flattered. “I must have a kindly look about me,” I said
+to myself, “for a child to smile a welcome at me like that. What is your
+name?” I asked her.
+
+“Marguerite,” replied her mother.
+
+It was half-past six. There was a news-vendor’s hard by. I bought a
+paper. As soon as I glanced at it I saw that I was in for a wigging. The
+political editor, having referred to my Chief as an individual of ill
+omen, spoke of me too, on the first page, as a sinister creature. But,
+after Marguerite’s kisses, I could not believe it. I felt at once a
+lightness and a sort of emptiness at heart; both glad and sorrowful.
+
+A week later found me on my way, to ------ near Melun, where I had taken
+a little house hard by the Château of Marguerite’s upbringing. In my
+eyes it was the fairest region in the world.
+
+As we approached the station I looked out of the carriage window.
+The silver river flowed in graceful curves between willows, until it
+vanished from the sight. But long after it was lost to view one could
+divine its course by the rows of poplars which lined its banks. A
+weathercock and two towers visible amid the trees marked the site of the
+town. Then I exclaimed, “Here is the resting place for me, here will I
+lay my head.”
+
+[Illustration: 067]
+
+
+[Illustration: 068]
+
+
+
+
+25th July
+
+The walk I love best is the walk to Saint-Jean, for there, about
+a hundred yards from the town is a little wood, or rather a little
+half-wild cluster of hornbeams, maples, limes and lilac bushes, a
+bouquet that murmurs in the breeze. The very first day I discovered it,
+I felt its charm. I determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to
+know it tree by tree, to search out its humblest plants, its vetches,
+its saxifrages, and to see whether there was no Solomon’s seal to be
+found growing beneath the shade of the big trees. I kept my word and
+now I am beginning to make acquaintance with the flora and fauna of my
+little wood. I had been reclining on the grass to-day for the space of
+an hour, book in hand, when I heard some one crying in a faint voice.
+I looked up and beheld a little girl standing beside an elderly man and
+weeping. The man was undeniably old. His face was long and pallid.
+There was an expression of sadness in his eyes and his mouth drooped
+mournfully. He had a skipping-rope in his hand and was looking fixedly
+at the child. Then he turned aside to brush away a tear from his cheek.
+It was then that I beheld him full face and saw that he was Marguerite’s
+father. I was shocked at the great change that illness and sorrow had
+wrought in his haughty mien. Despair was graven on his countenance and
+he seemed to be calling for help.
+
+[Illustration: 070]
+
+I went up to him and, in response to my offer to assist him in any way
+possible, he explained with some embarrassment that a ball with which
+his little girl had been playing had got caught in a tree and that
+his stick, which he had thrown up in order to dislodge it, had become
+entangled in the branches. He was at his wit’s end.
+
+Only a few years before, this same man had circumvented the policy of
+England and imparted a vigorous stimulus to French diplomacy in Europe.
+Then he fell with honour, and was followed in his retirement by a
+profound but honourable unpopularity. And now, behold his powers are
+unequal to the task of dislodging a ball from a tree. Such is the
+frailty of man. As for his daughter, Marie’s daughter, a sort of
+presentiment forbade me to look in her face. And then when at length
+I did look at her, I could not tear myself away from such a sorrowful
+object of contemplation. She was no longer the little pink and white
+child I had seen in the Champs-Elysées; she had grown taller and
+thinner, and her face was wan as a waxen taper. Her languid eyes were
+encircled with blue rings. And her temples . . . what invisible hand had
+laid those two sad violets upon her temples?
+
+“There! there! there!” cried the old man as he stretched forth a
+trembling arm which pointed aimlessly in all directions.
+
+The first thing to be done was to help him. By means of a stone which I
+threw up into the tree, I soon managed to bring the ball down. X . . .
+witnessed its fall with childish delight. He had not recognized me. I
+hurriedly escaped to spare him the trouble of thanking me and myself the
+agony of seeing the change that had taken place in Marie’s daughter.
+
+[Illustration: 074]
+
+
+[Illustration: 076]
+
+
+
+
+10th August
+
+I seldom go out. I am no longer moved by the beauty of things. Or to
+speak more truly, the more pleasurable and splendid aspects of nature
+give me pain. All day long I sully sheet after sheet of paper and
+beguile the tedious hours with the half-faded recollections of my
+childhood. What I am writing will be burned. I should be ashamed that
+pages, tear-stained and dream-haunted, should fall beneath the eyes
+of grave, sober-minded folk. What would they see in them? Naught but
+childish faces.
+
+[Illustration: 078]
+
+
+
+
+20th August
+
+To-dau I went for a stroll by the river in whose blue waters are
+mirrored the willows and the houses that befringe its banks. There is a
+seductive charm about running waters. They bear along with them as they
+flow all those idlers who love to dream their time away.
+
+The river lured me as far as the château de- ------ which had witnessed
+the betrothal and the death of Marie, and the birth of Marguerite. My
+heart tolled a knell within me when I saw once more that peaceful abode,
+which, despite the scenes of sorrow enacted within its walls, speaks,
+with its white pillared façade, of naught save elegant opulence and
+luxurious repose. I was so overcome that, to save myself from falling,
+I clung to the bars of the park gate and gazed at the wide lawns which
+stretched away as far as the flight of steps which the hem of Marie’s
+robe had kissed so often. I had been there some minutes when the gate
+was opened and X ... came out.
+
+On this occasion, also, he was accompanied by his child: but this time
+she was not walking. She was lying in a perambulator which was being
+pushed by a governess. With her head resting on an embroidered pillow in
+the shadow of the lowered hood, she resembled one of those little waxen
+images of saint or martyr, embellished with silver filigree, on whose
+wounds and gems the nuns of Spain are wont to pore in the solitude of
+their cells.
+
+[Illustration: 080]
+
+Her father, elegantly dressed, presented a faded, tear-stained
+countenance. He advanced towards me with little faltering steps, took me
+by the hand and led me to his little girl.
+
+“Tell me,” he said in the tone of a child asking a favour, “you don’t
+think she has changed since you last saw her, do you? It was the day she
+threw her ball up into the tree.”
+
+The perambulator which we were following in silence came to a halt in
+the Bois Saint-Jean. The governess lowered the hood. Marguerite lay with
+her head thrown back, her eyes big with terror, and she was stretching
+out her arms to push aside something that we could not see. Oh, I
+guessed well enough what invisible hand it was. The same hand that had
+touched the mother was now laid upon the child. I fell on my knees.
+But the phantom departed and Marguerite, raising her head, lay resting
+peacefully. I gathered some flowers and laid them reverently beside her.
+She smiled. Seeing her come back to life I gave her more flowers and
+sang to her, endeavouring to beguile her. The air and the feeling of
+happiness she now experienced brought back to her that desire to live
+which had forsaken her. At the end of an hour her cheeks were almost
+rosy. When it grew cool and we had to take the little suffering child
+back to the château again, her father took my hand as we parted and,
+pressing it, said in suppliant tones:
+
+“Come again to-morrow.”
+
+[Illustration: 084]
+
+
+[Illustration: 086]
+
+
+
+
+21 st August
+
+I returned next day. On the steps of the Empire château I encountered
+the family doctor. He is a spare, elderly man whom you meet wherever
+there is good music to be heard. He seems like a man perpetually
+listening to the harmonies of some inward concert. He is for ever under
+the spell of sounds and lives by his ear alone. He is specially noted
+for his treatment of nervous complaints. Some say he is a genius;
+others that he is mad. Certainly there is something peculiar about him.
+When I saw him he was coming down the steps; his feet, his finger and
+his lips moving in time to some intricate measure.
+
+“Well, doctor,” I said with an involuntary quaver in my voice, “and how
+is your little patient?”
+
+“She means to live,” he answered.
+
+“You will pull her through for us, won’t you?” I said eagerly.
+
+“I tell you she means to live.”
+
+“And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really
+want to and that we do not die save with our own consent?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the
+gate, his head bowed as if in thought.
+
+“Certainly,” he said again, “but they must really want to and not merely
+think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none
+save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say
+they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in
+which all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is
+unconscious, it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and
+when it fails we cease to be. The world _wills_, otherwise it would not
+exist.”
+
+We walked on a few steps farther.
+
+“Look here,” he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak
+tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads,
+“if that fellow there had not _willed_ to grow, I should like to know
+what power could have made him do so.”
+
+But I had ceased to listen.
+
+“So you have hopes,” I said at length, “that Marguerite . . .”
+
+But he was a stubborn little old fellow.
+
+He murmured as he walked away: “The Will’s crowning Victory is Love.”
+
+And I stood and watched him as he departed with little quick steps,
+beating time to a tune that was running in his head.
+
+I went quickly back to the château and found little Marguerite. The
+moment I saw her, I realized that she had the will to live. She was
+still very pale and very thin, but her eyes had more colour in them and
+were not so big, and her lips, lately so dead-looking and so silent,
+were gay with prattling talk.
+
+“You are late,” she said. “Come here, see! I have a theatre and actors.
+Play me a beautiful piece. They say that ‘Hop o’ my Thumb’ is nice. Play
+‘Hop o’ my Thumb’ for me.”
+
+[Illustration: 090]
+
+You may be sure I did not refuse. However, I encountered great
+difficulties at the very outset of my undertaking. I pointed out to
+Marguerite that the only actors she had were princes and princesses,
+and that we wanted woodmen, cooks and a certain number of folks of all
+sorts.
+
+She thought for a moment and then said:
+
+“A prince dressed like a cook; that one there looks like a cook, don’t
+you think?”
+
+“Yes, I think so too.”
+
+“Well, then, we’ll make woodmen and cooks out of all the princes we have
+over.”
+
+And that’s what we did. O Wisdom, what a day we spent together!
+
+Many others like it followed in its train. I watched Marguerite taking
+an ever firmer hold on life. Now she is quite well again. I had a share
+in this miracle. I discovered a tiny portion of that gift wherein the
+apostles so richly abounded when they healed the sick by the laying on
+of hands.
+
+
+_Editor’s Note_.--I found this manuscript in a train on the Northern
+Railway. I give it to the public without alteration of any sort, save
+that, as the names were those of well-known persons, I have thought it
+well to suppress them.
+
+Anatole France.
+
+[Illustration: 093]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Marguerite
+       1921
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Illustrator: Simeon
+
+Translator: J. Lewis May
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25406]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGUERITE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE
+
+By Anatole France
+
+Translated From The French By J. Lewis May
+
+With Twenty-Nine Original Woodcuts By Simeon
+
+London, John Lane Company, MCMXXI
+
+
+[Illustration: titlepage 010]
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY LETTER
+
+Publish Marguerite, dear Monsieur Andr� Coq, if you so desire, but pray
+relieve me from all responsibility in the matter.
+
+It would argue too much literary conceit on my part were I anxious to
+restore it to the light of day. It would argue, perhaps, still more did
+I endeavour to keep it in obscurity. You will not succeed in wresting it
+for long from the eternal oblivion where-unto it is destined. Ay me, how
+old it is! I had lost all recollection of it. I have just read it over,
+without fear or favour, as I should a work unknown to me, and it does
+not seem to me that I have lighted upon a masterpiece. It would ill
+beseem me to say more about it than that. My only pleasure as I read it
+was derived from the proof it afforded that, even in those far-off days,
+when I was writing this little trifle, I was no great lover of the Third
+Republic with its pinchbeck virtues, its militarist imperialism, its
+ideas of conquest, its love of money, its contempt for the handicrafts,
+its unswerving predilection for the unlovely. Its leaders caused me
+terrible misgivings. And the event has surpassed my apprehensions.
+
+But it was not in my calculations to make myself a laughing-stock, by
+taking Marguerite as a text for generalizations on French politics of
+the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+
+The specimens of type and the woodcuts you have shown me promise a very
+comely little book.
+
+Believe me, dear Monsieur Coq,
+
+Yours sincerely,
+
+Anatole France.
+
+La B�chellerie, 16th April, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE
+
+[Illustration: 018]
+
+
+
+
+5th July
+
+As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five o'clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
+my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
+gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper
+an invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the
+direction of the Champs-Elys�es, victorias and landaus kept rolling by.
+In the shadow of the lowered carriage-hoods, women's faces gleamed clear
+and radiant and I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by
+like hopes vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman
+as she passed by left me with an impression of light and perfume.
+I think a man, if he is wise, will not ask much more than that of a
+beautiful woman. A gleam and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even
+less behind it. Moreover, that day, if Fortune herself had run with her
+wheel a-spinning before my very nose along the pavement of the Pont
+de la Concorde, I should not have so much as stretched forth an arm to
+pluck her by her golden hair. I lacked nothing that day; all was mine.
+It was five o'clock and I was free till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free
+to saunter at will, to breathe at my ease for two hours, to look on at
+things and not have to talk, to let my thoughts wander as I listed. All
+was mine, I say again. My happiness was making me a selfish man. I
+gazed at everything about me as though it were all a picture, a splendid
+moving pageant, arranged for my own particular delectation. It seemed
+to me as though the sun were shining for me alone, as though it were
+pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my special
+gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
+swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
+destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the
+people about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an
+illusion, that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has
+when he has nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that
+score with a poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten
+years on end with politics and law making and is wearing away his life
+with those trivial preoccupations men call affairs of state.
+
+In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
+colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
+ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
+from the printer's and all smelling of printer's ink, conversations
+in green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
+speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one
+things, the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the
+grey and gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the
+purple hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night;
+tasks which leave you no soul to call your own and rob you of the
+consciousness of your own identity.
+
+Yes, it is so. I have left my own _ego_ behind me there. It is scattered
+up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports. Industrious junior
+clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of their beautiful green
+filing cases. And so I have had to go on living without my _ego_,
+which, moreover, is how all politicians have to live. But an _ego_ is a
+strangely subtle thing. And wonder of wonders! mine came back to me just
+now on the Pont de la Concorde. 'Twas he without a doubt and, would
+you believe it, he had not suffered so very much from his sojourn among
+those musty papers. The very moment he arrived I found myself again, I
+recognized my own existence, whereof I had not been conscious these
+ten years. "Ha ha!" said I to myself, "since I exist, I am just as well
+pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now to improve this
+new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover's thoughts in my heart, down
+the Champs-Elys�es."
+
+And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured
+steeds of Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds
+themselves; this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance
+is marked by their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The
+carriages flow past endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of
+lava or molten asphalt, whereon the hats of the women seem borne along
+like so many flowers, and like everything else one sees in Paris, at
+once extravagant and pretty. I light up a cigar and looking at nothing,
+behold everything. So intense is my joy that it scares me. It is the
+first cigar I have smoked for ten years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun
+as many as ten a day in my room; but those I scorched, bit, chewed and
+threw away; I never smoked them. This one I am really and truly smoking
+and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of poesy spreading grace and charm
+about it. What an interest I take in all I see. These little shops,
+which display at regular intervals their motley assortment of wares,
+fill me with delight. Here especially is one which I cannot forbear
+stopping to look at. What I chiefly delight to contemplate there is a
+decanter with lemonade in it. The decanter reflects in miniature on its
+polished sides the trees around it and the women that pass by and the
+skies. It has a lemon on the top of it which gives it a sort of oriental
+air. However, it is not its shape nor its colour that is the attraction
+in my eyes; I cannot keep my gaze from it because it reminds me of
+my childhood. At the sight of it, innumerable delightful scenes come
+thronging into my memory. Once again do I behold those shining hours,
+those hours divine of early childhood. Ah, what would I not give to be
+again the little boy of those days and to drink once more a glass of
+that precious liquid!
+
+[Illustration: 024]
+
+In that little shop, I find once more, besides the lemonade and the
+gooseberry syrup, all those divers things wherein my childhood took
+delight. Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches,
+belts, scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five
+to nine years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of
+a Napoleon. I played that mighty r�le, in my tenpenny soldier's kit,
+I played it from start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of
+exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured
+prints from �pinal. It was on them that I began to spell out those signs
+which to the learned reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle.
+Yes, the sorriest little coloured daub that ever came out of a village
+in the Vosges consists of print and pictures, and what is the sum and
+substance of Science after all but just pictures and print?
+
+From those �pinal prints I learned things far finer and more useful
+than anything I ever got from the little grammar and history books my
+schoolmasters gave me to pore over. �pinal prints, you see, are stories,
+and stories are mirrors of destiny. Blessed is the child that is brought
+up on fairy-tales. His riper years should prove rich in wisdom and
+imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story _The Blue Bird_. I
+know him by his outspread tail. 'Tis he right enough. It is as much as
+I can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman's
+neck and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt
+I owe him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to
+him. Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of
+the Blue Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and
+parliamentary documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect
+then that the human soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable
+metamorphoses and hallowed sorrows, and if, under the spell of such
+thoughts, I gave to the clause I chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a
+humaner sense, an added respect for the soul and its rights, and for
+the universal order of things, that clause would never fail to encounter
+vigorous opposition in the Chamber. The counsels of the Blue Bird seldom
+prevailed in the committee stage. Howbeit some did manage to get through
+Parliament.
+
+I now perceive that I am not the only one inspecting the little stall:
+a little girl has come to a halt in front of the brilliant display. I
+am looking at her from behind. Her long, bright hair comes tumbling in
+cascades from under her red velvet hood and spreads out on her broad
+lace collar and on her dress, which is the same colour as her hood.
+Impossible to say what is the colour of her hair (there is no colour so
+beautiful) but one can describe the lights in it; they are bright and
+pure and changing, fair as the sun's rays, pale as a beam of starlight.
+Nay, more than that, they shine, yes; but they flow also. They possess
+the splendour of light, and the charm of pleasant waters. Methinks that,
+were I a poet, I should write as many sonnets on those tresses as M.
+Jos� Maria de Heredia composed concerning the Conquerors of Castille
+d'Or. They would not be so fine, but they would be sweeter. The child,
+so far as I can judge, is between four and five years old. All I can see
+of her face is the tip of her ear, daintier than the daintiest jewel,
+and the innocent curve of her cheek. She does not stir; she is holding
+her hoop in her left hand; her right is at her lips as though she were
+biting her nails in her eager contemplation. What is it she is gazing
+at so longingly? The shop contains other things besides the arms and the
+gear of fighting men. Balls and skipping ropes are suspended from the
+awning. On the stall are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard,
+smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little
+six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms,
+little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them
+a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has
+no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips
+of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. He
+is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth all by himself. He
+dominates, he effaces everything else. Once you have beheld him, you see
+naught else save him.
+
+Bolt upright in his warm wraps, a little swansdown tucker under his
+chin, he is stretching out his little chubby arms for some one to take
+him. He speaks straight to the little maid's heart. He appeals to her
+by every maternal instinct she possesses. He is enchanting. His face has
+three little dots, two black ones for the eyes, and one red one for the
+mouth. But his eyes speak, his mouth invites you. He is alive.
+
+Philosophers are a heedless race. They pass by dolls with never a
+thought. Nevertheless the doll is more than the statue, more than the
+idol. It finds its way to the heart of woman, long ere she be a woman.
+It gives her the first thrill of maternity. The doll is a thing august.
+Wherefore cannot one of our great sculptors be so very kind as to take
+the trouble to model dolls whose lineaments, coming to life beneath his
+fingers, would tell of wisdom and of beauty?
+
+At last the little girl awakens from her silent day-dream. She turns
+round and shows her violet eyes made bigger still with wonder, her nose
+which makes you smile to look at it, her tiny nose, quite white, that
+reminds you of a little pug dog's black one, her solemn mouth, her
+shapely but too delicate chin, her cheeks a shade too pale. I recognize
+her. Oh yes! I recognize her with that instinctive certainty that is
+stronger than all convictions supported by all the proofs imaginable. Oh
+yes, 'tis she, 'tis indeed she and all that remains of the most charming
+of women. I try to hasten away but I cannot leave her. That hair of
+living gold, it is her mother's hair; those violet eyes, they are her
+mother's own; Oh, child of my dreams, child of my despair! I long to
+gather you to my arms, to steal you, to bear you away.
+
+But a governess draws near, calls the child and leads her away: "Come,
+Marguerite, come along, it's time to go home."
+
+And Marguerite, casting a look of sad farewell at the baby with its
+outstretched arms, reluctantly follows in the footsteps of a tall woman
+clad in black with ostrich feathers in her hat.
+
+[Illustration: Endpiece 033]
+
+
+[Illustration: 034]
+
+
+
+
+10th July
+
+"Jean, bring me file 117.... Now then, M. Boscheron, let's get this
+circular done. Take this down: _I draw your special attention, M. le
+Pr�fet, to the following point. An end must be put at the earliest
+possible moment to an abuse which, if suffered to continue, would tend
+to--tend to--I draw your special attention to the following point, M. le
+Pr�fet. An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse_. Take that
+down, M. Boscheron."
+
+But M. Boscheron, my secretary, respectfully remarks that I keep on
+dictating the same sentence. Jean deferentially places a file on my
+table.
+
+"What's that, Jean?"
+
+"File number 117. You asked me to fetch it, sir."
+
+"I asked you for file number 117?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Jean gives me an anxious glance and retires.
+
+"Where were we, M. Boscheron?"
+
+"An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse . . . ."
+
+"That's right... _an abuse which would tend to diminish popular respect
+for government servants and to transform_... transform, what a wealth
+of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it
+but a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade
+the secret recesses of my being." "I beg pardon, monsieur?" "What did
+you say, M. Boscheron?" "Please repeat, monsieur; I didn't quite follow
+you."
+
+"Really, Monsieur Boscheron? Possibly I was not very clear. Well, well!
+we will stop there if you like. Give me what I have dictated, I will
+finish it myself."
+
+[Illustration: 036]
+
+M. Boscheron gives me his notes, gathers up his papers, bows and
+retires. Left alone in my office, I fall to examining the wallpaper with
+a sort of idiotic minuteness. It has the appearance of green felt with
+here and there a yellow stain; I begin to draw little men on my paper;
+I make an effort to write; for the fact is my Chief has asked for the
+circular three times and has promised the government deputies that it
+shall go to the prefects forthwith. I am bound to let him have it. I
+begin reading it through: _to diminish popular respect for government
+servants and to transform them_. I make a blot; then with my pen I
+adorn it with hair. I transform it into a comet. I dream of Marguerite's
+tresses. The other day, in the Champs-Elys�es, little filaments of gold,
+little delicate spirals stood out from the rest of her graceful tresses,
+with a singular brightness. You can see their like in fifteenth century
+miniatures, also in some of an earlier date. Dante says in his _Vita
+Nuova_: "One day when I was busy drawing angel's heads . . ." And now
+here am I trying to draw angels' heads on a government circular. Come
+now, we must get on with it: _government servants and to transform
+them--transform them_ . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single
+word after that? How is it I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever
+since I rediscovered my _ego_ on the Pont de la Concorde that evening
+of the lovely sunset? Transform, did I say? O God of mystery, nature,
+truth, if she whose name even now after four years I dare not utter, if
+she died in giving life to Marguerite, I should believe, I should know
+with the certainty of instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed
+into the daughter and that they are one and the same being.
+
+[Illustration: 040]
+
+
+[Illustration: 042]
+
+
+
+
+1st November
+
+All's well. I have lost my _ego_ again. It has gone back into the green
+filing cases. Number 117 contains a good part of it. I have finished my
+circular. It is drawn up in good official style. We have a fine piece of
+legislation to get off before the holidays. My Chief speaks every day in
+the House. Every night I correct the proofs of his speeches. If the
+Blue Bird comes to see me now and again in the small hall of the Palais
+Bourbon, it is merely to advise me to tone down some rather too forcible
+expression and he never addresses himself to my imagination. I don't
+know whether I am living happily or unhappily since I don't know that
+I am living at all. I do not even recognize my own clothes. I picked up
+the hat of the Comte de M�rodac a little while ago and wore it for three
+days without knowing it, yet it is a romantic sombrero-like
+sort of thing worn nowadays by no one save this elderly nobleman. I cut
+an astounding figure they told me, but I never noticed myself, and,
+if by chance I had, I should not have heeded what I saw since it had
+nothing to do with politics. I am no longer a person; I am a piece of
+the official machine. To-night I have neither proofs to correct nor
+official reception to attend. I have put on my slippers. There is always
+a tiny bit of my _ego_ hidden away in these slippers. I am in my room
+seated by the fire and I am conscious of being there. By heaven I wonder
+whether I should know myself in the glass. Let's have a look. Hum! not
+so very ... I didn't think I was so grave and respectable looking. I
+quite see that I shall have to take myself seriously. I have been a long
+time about it, but then it wasn't for me to begin.
+
+I am a man of weight and I account myself such. But, alas, I do not know
+myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
+tedious business. No, I haven't the smallest desire to hold converse
+with the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the
+other hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that
+little fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against
+the frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a
+nice little chap. I feel like calling him and saying "Let's go and have
+a game together shall we?" But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That
+little boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead
+as if I were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For
+what have we in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me
+to-day? In what do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?
+
+We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
+over again.
+
+[Illustration: 046]
+
+I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
+time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
+with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
+adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
+battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart
+like a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to
+soothe all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the
+child that I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me;
+I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without
+unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my
+innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in
+swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding
+life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of
+irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not
+already been delved within her, though she is but five years old. I,
+a stranger, a passer-by, know more of her life than she does and, in
+consequence, I am more truly she than she herself. After that let him
+who will prate of the feeling of identity and the consciousness of self.
+
+Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss
+of terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
+instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
+slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they
+have called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are
+only bearable provided we do not think about them.
+
+[Illustration: 049]
+
+
+[Illustration: 050]
+
+
+
+
+5th July
+
+It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front
+of a toyshop in the Champs-Elys�es, the child of her who first awakened
+in me the sense of beauty.
+
+I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was
+unknown to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love.
+The first time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert
+to which her father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had
+heard the finest orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her
+attired in stately weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only
+served to accentuate her radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in
+me feelings which bore, I think, a close resemblance to religious
+exaltation. I was no longer very young. The uncertainty of my worldly
+position, dependent as it then was upon the vicissitudes of a political
+party, combined with my natural timidity to deprive me of all hope of
+figuring as a successful suitor. I often saw her at her father's and she
+treated me with an air of open friendliness that did not encourage me to
+foster higher ambitions. It was clear I did not impress her as the sort
+of man with whom she could fall in love. As for me, the sight of her
+and the sound of her voice produced in me such a state of delicious
+agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled though it be with grief,
+still avails to make me in love with life.
+
+[Illustration: 052]
+
+Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her
+always; I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain
+to wed her. No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my
+heart. "It was not love then," some one will say. I know not what it
+was, but I know that it filled my soul.
+
+Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange
+to the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
+sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
+They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
+break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
+remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life;
+then, one day, she told me she was going to be married. My feelings, as
+I have said, bear a strong resemblance to religious emotion. They
+are sad, but in their sadness they still preserve their charm. Grief
+corrupts them not. From suffering they derive a wholesome bitterness
+that lends them strength. I listened to her with that gentle courage
+which comes with renunciation. She was marrying a man senior to myself,
+a widower, almost an old man, whose birth and fortune had marked him
+out for the public career in which he had displayed a haughtiness of
+disposition and much misplaced courage. Although I moved in a lower
+sphere, I came in contact with him on several important occasions. I
+belonged to a political group with views very similar to his own, but we
+had never been able to meet without considerable friction and, although
+the newspapers treated us with the same approval or, as was more often
+the case, with the same hostility, we were not friends, far from it, and
+we avoided each other with sedulous care.
+
+I was present at the wedding. I saw, and I shall ever see Marie, wearing
+her white dress and lace veil. She was a little pale and very lovely. I
+was struck, without apparent reason, by the impression of fragility with
+which this girl who was animated by so poetic a soul seemed to give one.
+This impression, which I think occurred to no one but myself, was only
+too well founded. I never saw Marie again.
+
+She died after three years of married life, leaving a little girl ten
+months old. An indescribable feeling of tender affection has always
+drawn me to this child, to Marie's Marguerite. An unconquerable desire
+to see her took possession of me.
+
+She was being brought up at ------ near Melun, where her father had a
+ch�teau standing in the midst of a magnificent park. One day I went to
+------ and wandered for hours, like a thief, about the park bound-aries.
+At last, through a gap in the trees, I caught sight of Marguerite in the
+arms of her nurse, who was dressed in black. She was wearing a hat with
+white plumes and an embroidered pelisse. I cannot say in what respect
+she differed from any other child, but I thought she was the fairest
+in the world. It was autumn. The wind that was sighing in the trees
+was whirling the dead leaves about in little eddies as they floated
+to earth. Dead leaves covered all the long avenue in which the little
+white-robed child was being carried up and down. An immense sadness
+took possession of me. At the edge of a bed of flowers as white as the
+raiment of Marguerite, an old gardener who was gathering up the fallen
+leaves saluted his little mistress with a smile and, with his hand on
+his rake and hat in hand, spoke to her with the gentle gaiety of old men
+who are not overburdened with their thoughts. But she paid no heed to
+him. With her little hand like to a star she sought her nurse's breast.
+As I hurried away with grief in my heart, the nurse resumed her walk
+and I heard the sound of the dead leaves sighing sorrowfully beneath her
+steps.
+
+[Illustration: 058]
+
+
+[Illustration: 060]
+
+
+
+
+10th July
+
+The President of the Chamber rises and says: "The motion proposed by
+Messrs. ------ and ------ is now put."
+
+The Prime Minister, without quitting his seat says: "The Government does
+not assent to the motion."
+
+The President rings his bell and says: "A ballot has been demanded. A
+ballot will therefore be taken. Those in favour of Messrs. ------ and
+------'s motion must place a white paper in the urn; those who are
+against it, a blue paper."
+
+There was a great movement in the hall. The deputies poured out in a
+disorderly mob into the corridors, while the ushers passed the white
+metal urn along the tiers of seats. The corridors were full of the
+sound of shuffling feet, and of shouting and gesticulating people. Grave
+looking young men and excited old ones went passing by. The air was
+pierced with the sound of voices calling out figures:
+
+"Eleven votes."
+
+"No, nine."
+
+"They are being checked."
+
+"Eight against."
+
+"No, not at all; eight for."
+
+"What, the amendment is carried?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The Government is beaten?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+The President's bell is heard in the corridors.
+
+Slowly the hall fills again.
+
+The President standing up with a paper in his hand rings his bell for
+the last time and says:
+
+"The following is the result of the ballot on the motion proposed by
+Messrs. ------ and ------. Number of votes 470; for the motion 239 ;
+against 231. The motion is carried."
+
+There is an immense sensation. The Ministers get up and leave their
+seats. Two or three friends shake them timidly by the hand. It's all
+over, they are beaten. They go under and I with them. I no longer count.
+I make up my mind to it. To say that I am happy would be to go too
+far. But it spells the end of my worries and bothers and toils. I have
+regained my freedom, but not voluntarily. Repose and liberty, I've got
+them back again, but it is to my defeat that I owe them. An honourable
+defeat it is true, but painful all the same because our ideas suffer
+with ourselves. How many things are involved in our fall, alas.
+Economy, public security, tranquillity of conscience and that spirit of
+prudence, that continuity of policy, which gives a nation its strength.
+I hurried away to shake hands with the Chief of my department, proud of
+having rendered faithful service to so upright a leader. Then, pushing
+my way through the crowd that had gathered about the precincts of the
+Palais Bourbon, I crossed the Seine and made my way slowly towards the
+Madeleine. At the top of the boulevard there was a barrow of flowers
+drawn up alongside the kerb. Between the two shafts was a young girl
+making up bunches of violets. I went up to her and asked her for a
+bunch. I then saw a little girl of four sitting on the barrow amid the
+flowers. With her baby fingers she was trying to make bunches like her
+mother. She raised her head at my approach and, with a smile, held out
+all the flowers she had in her hands. When she had given them all to me,
+she blew kisses.
+
+[Illustration: 064]
+
+I was extremely flattered. "I must have a kindly look about me," I said
+to myself, "for a child to smile a welcome at me like that. What is your
+name?" I asked her.
+
+"Marguerite," replied her mother.
+
+It was half-past six. There was a news-vendor's hard by. I bought a
+paper. As soon as I glanced at it I saw that I was in for a wigging. The
+political editor, having referred to my Chief as an individual of ill
+omen, spoke of me too, on the first page, as a sinister creature. But,
+after Marguerite's kisses, I could not believe it. I felt at once a
+lightness and a sort of emptiness at heart; both glad and sorrowful.
+
+A week later found me on my way, to ------ near Melun, where I had taken
+a little house hard by the Ch�teau of Marguerite's upbringing. In my
+eyes it was the fairest region in the world.
+
+As we approached the station I looked out of the carriage window.
+The silver river flowed in graceful curves between willows, until it
+vanished from the sight. But long after it was lost to view one could
+divine its course by the rows of poplars which lined its banks. A
+weathercock and two towers visible amid the trees marked the site of the
+town. Then I exclaimed, "Here is the resting place for me, here will I
+lay my head."
+
+[Illustration: 067]
+
+
+[Illustration: 068]
+
+
+
+
+25th July
+
+The walk I love best is the walk to Saint-Jean, for there, about
+a hundred yards from the town is a little wood, or rather a little
+half-wild cluster of hornbeams, maples, limes and lilac bushes, a
+bouquet that murmurs in the breeze. The very first day I discovered it,
+I felt its charm. I determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to
+know it tree by tree, to search out its humblest plants, its vetches,
+its saxifrages, and to see whether there was no Solomon's seal to be
+found growing beneath the shade of the big trees. I kept my word and
+now I am beginning to make acquaintance with the flora and fauna of my
+little wood. I had been reclining on the grass to-day for the space of
+an hour, book in hand, when I heard some one crying in a faint voice.
+I looked up and beheld a little girl standing beside an elderly man and
+weeping. The man was undeniably old. His face was long and pallid.
+There was an expression of sadness in his eyes and his mouth drooped
+mournfully. He had a skipping-rope in his hand and was looking fixedly
+at the child. Then he turned aside to brush away a tear from his cheek.
+It was then that I beheld him full face and saw that he was Marguerite's
+father. I was shocked at the great change that illness and sorrow had
+wrought in his haughty mien. Despair was graven on his countenance and
+he seemed to be calling for help.
+
+[Illustration: 070]
+
+I went up to him and, in response to my offer to assist him in any way
+possible, he explained with some embarrassment that a ball with which
+his little girl had been playing had got caught in a tree and that
+his stick, which he had thrown up in order to dislodge it, had become
+entangled in the branches. He was at his wit's end.
+
+Only a few years before, this same man had circumvented the policy of
+England and imparted a vigorous stimulus to French diplomacy in Europe.
+Then he fell with honour, and was followed in his retirement by a
+profound but honourable unpopularity. And now, behold his powers are
+unequal to the task of dislodging a ball from a tree. Such is the
+frailty of man. As for his daughter, Marie's daughter, a sort of
+presentiment forbade me to look in her face. And then when at length
+I did look at her, I could not tear myself away from such a sorrowful
+object of contemplation. She was no longer the little pink and white
+child I had seen in the Champs-Elys�es; she had grown taller and
+thinner, and her face was wan as a waxen taper. Her languid eyes were
+encircled with blue rings. And her temples . . . what invisible hand had
+laid those two sad violets upon her temples?
+
+"There! there! there!" cried the old man as he stretched forth a
+trembling arm which pointed aimlessly in all directions.
+
+The first thing to be done was to help him. By means of a stone which I
+threw up into the tree, I soon managed to bring the ball down. X . . .
+witnessed its fall with childish delight. He had not recognized me. I
+hurriedly escaped to spare him the trouble of thanking me and myself the
+agony of seeing the change that had taken place in Marie's daughter.
+
+[Illustration: 074]
+
+
+[Illustration: 076]
+
+
+
+
+10th August
+
+I seldom go out. I am no longer moved by the beauty of things. Or to
+speak more truly, the more pleasurable and splendid aspects of nature
+give me pain. All day long I sully sheet after sheet of paper and
+beguile the tedious hours with the half-faded recollections of my
+childhood. What I am writing will be burned. I should be ashamed that
+pages, tear-stained and dream-haunted, should fall beneath the eyes
+of grave, sober-minded folk. What would they see in them? Naught but
+childish faces.
+
+[Illustration: 078]
+
+
+
+
+20th August
+
+To-dau I went for a stroll by the river in whose blue waters are
+mirrored the willows and the houses that befringe its banks. There is a
+seductive charm about running waters. They bear along with them as they
+flow all those idlers who love to dream their time away.
+
+The river lured me as far as the ch�teau de- ------ which had witnessed
+the betrothal and the death of Marie, and the birth of Marguerite. My
+heart tolled a knell within me when I saw once more that peaceful abode,
+which, despite the scenes of sorrow enacted within its walls, speaks,
+with its white pillared fa�ade, of naught save elegant opulence and
+luxurious repose. I was so overcome that, to save myself from falling,
+I clung to the bars of the park gate and gazed at the wide lawns which
+stretched away as far as the flight of steps which the hem of Marie's
+robe had kissed so often. I had been there some minutes when the gate
+was opened and X ... came out.
+
+On this occasion, also, he was accompanied by his child: but this time
+she was not walking. She was lying in a perambulator which was being
+pushed by a governess. With her head resting on an embroidered pillow in
+the shadow of the lowered hood, she resembled one of those little waxen
+images of saint or martyr, embellished with silver filigree, on whose
+wounds and gems the nuns of Spain are wont to pore in the solitude of
+their cells.
+
+[Illustration: 080]
+
+Her father, elegantly dressed, presented a faded, tear-stained
+countenance. He advanced towards me with little faltering steps, took me
+by the hand and led me to his little girl.
+
+"Tell me," he said in the tone of a child asking a favour, "you don't
+think she has changed since you last saw her, do you? It was the day she
+threw her ball up into the tree."
+
+The perambulator which we were following in silence came to a halt in
+the Bois Saint-Jean. The governess lowered the hood. Marguerite lay with
+her head thrown back, her eyes big with terror, and she was stretching
+out her arms to push aside something that we could not see. Oh, I
+guessed well enough what invisible hand it was. The same hand that had
+touched the mother was now laid upon the child. I fell on my knees.
+But the phantom departed and Marguerite, raising her head, lay resting
+peacefully. I gathered some flowers and laid them reverently beside her.
+She smiled. Seeing her come back to life I gave her more flowers and
+sang to her, endeavouring to beguile her. The air and the feeling of
+happiness she now experienced brought back to her that desire to live
+which had forsaken her. At the end of an hour her cheeks were almost
+rosy. When it grew cool and we had to take the little suffering child
+back to the ch�teau again, her father took my hand as we parted and,
+pressing it, said in suppliant tones:
+
+"Come again to-morrow."
+
+[Illustration: 084]
+
+
+[Illustration: 086]
+
+
+
+
+21 st August
+
+I returned next day. On the steps of the Empire ch�teau I encountered
+the family doctor. He is a spare, elderly man whom you meet wherever
+there is good music to be heard. He seems like a man perpetually
+listening to the harmonies of some inward concert. He is for ever under
+the spell of sounds and lives by his ear alone. He is specially noted
+for his treatment of nervous complaints. Some say he is a genius;
+others that he is mad. Certainly there is something peculiar about him.
+When I saw him he was coming down the steps; his feet, his finger and
+his lips moving in time to some intricate measure.
+
+"Well, doctor," I said with an involuntary quaver in my voice, "and how
+is your little patient?"
+
+"She means to live," he answered.
+
+"You will pull her through for us, won't you?" I said eagerly.
+
+"I tell you she means to live."
+
+"And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really
+want to and that we do not die save with our own consent?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the
+gate, his head bowed as if in thought.
+
+"Certainly," he said again, "but they must really want to and not merely
+think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none
+save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say
+they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in
+which all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is
+unconscious, it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and
+when it fails we cease to be. The world _wills_, otherwise it would not
+exist."
+
+We walked on a few steps farther.
+
+"Look here," he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak
+tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads,
+"if that fellow there had not _willed_ to grow, I should like to know
+what power could have made him do so."
+
+But I had ceased to listen.
+
+"So you have hopes," I said at length, "that Marguerite . . ."
+
+But he was a stubborn little old fellow.
+
+He murmured as he walked away: "The Will's crowning Victory is Love."
+
+And I stood and watched him as he departed with little quick steps,
+beating time to a tune that was running in his head.
+
+I went quickly back to the ch�teau and found little Marguerite. The
+moment I saw her, I realized that she had the will to live. She was
+still very pale and very thin, but her eyes had more colour in them and
+were not so big, and her lips, lately so dead-looking and so silent,
+were gay with prattling talk.
+
+"You are late," she said. "Come here, see! I have a theatre and actors.
+Play me a beautiful piece. They say that 'Hop o' my Thumb' is nice. Play
+'Hop o' my Thumb' for me."
+
+[Illustration: 090]
+
+You may be sure I did not refuse. However, I encountered great
+difficulties at the very outset of my undertaking. I pointed out to
+Marguerite that the only actors she had were princes and princesses,
+and that we wanted woodmen, cooks and a certain number of folks of all
+sorts.
+
+She thought for a moment and then said:
+
+"A prince dressed like a cook; that one there looks like a cook, don't
+you think?"
+
+"Yes, I think so too."
+
+"Well, then, we'll make woodmen and cooks out of all the princes we have
+over."
+
+And that's what we did. O Wisdom, what a day we spent together!
+
+Many others like it followed in its train. I watched Marguerite taking
+an ever firmer hold on life. Now she is quite well again. I had a share
+in this miracle. I discovered a tiny portion of that gift wherein the
+apostles so richly abounded when they healed the sick by the laying on
+of hands.
+
+
+_Editor's Note_.--I found this manuscript in a train on the Northern
+Railway. I give it to the public without alteration of any sort, save
+that, as the names were those of well-known persons, I have thought it
+well to suppress them.
+
+Anatole France.
+
+[Illustration: 093]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Marguerite, by Anatole France
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
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+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Marguerite
+       1921
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Illustrator: Simeon
+
+Translator: J. Lewis May
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25406]
+Last Updated: October 5, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGUERITE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/margTP.jpg" alt="Titlepage 010 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      MARGUERITE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Anatole France
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Translated From The French By J. Lewis May <br /> <br /> With Twenty-Nine
+      Original Woodcuts By Simeon
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      London, John Lane Company, MCMXXI
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> PREFATORY LETTER </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <big><b>MARGUERITE</b></big> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> 5th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> 10th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> 1st November </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> 5th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> 10th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> 25th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> 10th August </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> 20th August </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> 21st August </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFATORY LETTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Publish Marguerite, dear Monsieur André Coq, if you so desire, but pray
+      relieve me from all responsibility in the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would argue too much literary conceit on my part were I anxious to
+      restore it to the light of day. It would argue, perhaps, still more did I
+      endeavour to keep it in obscurity. You will not succeed in wresting it for
+      long from the eternal oblivion where-unto it is destined. Ay me, how old
+      it is! I had lost all recollection of it. I have just read it over,
+      without fear or favour, as I should a work unknown to me, and it does not
+      seem to me that I have lighted upon a masterpiece. It would ill beseem me
+      to say more about it than that. My only pleasure as I read it was derived
+      from the proof it afforded that, even in those far-off days, when I was
+      writing this little trifle, I was no great lover of the Third Republic
+      with its pinchbeck virtues, its militarist imperialism, its ideas of
+      conquest, its love of money, its contempt for the handicrafts, its
+      unswerving predilection for the unlovely. Its leaders caused me terrible
+      misgivings. And the event has surpassed my apprehensions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not in my calculations to make myself a laughing-stock, by
+      taking Marguerite as a text for generalizations on French politics of the
+      late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The specimens of type and the woodcuts you have shown me promise a very
+      comely little book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Believe me, dear Monsieur Coq,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours sincerely,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anatole France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      La Béchellerie, 16th April, 1920.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MARGUERITE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/018.jpg" alt="018 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      5th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five o&rsquo;clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
+      my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
+      gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper an
+      invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the direction of
+      the Champs-Elysées, victorias and landaus kept rolling by. In the shadow
+      of the lowered carriage-hoods, women&rsquo;s faces gleamed clear and radiant and
+      I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by like hopes
+      vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman as she passed
+      by left me with an impression of light and perfume. I think a man, if he
+      is wise, will not ask much more than that of a beautiful woman. A gleam
+      and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even less behind it. Moreover,
+      that day, if Fortune herself had run with her wheel a-spinning before my
+      very nose along the pavement of the Pont de la Concorde, I should not have
+      so much as stretched forth an arm to pluck her by her golden hair. I
+      lacked nothing that day; all was mine. It was five o&rsquo;clock and I was free
+      till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free to saunter at will, to breathe at my
+      ease for two hours, to look on at things and not have to talk, to let my
+      thoughts wander as I listed. All was mine, I say again. My happiness was
+      making me a selfish man. I gazed at everything about me as though it were
+      all a picture, a splendid moving pageant, arranged for my own particular
+      delectation. It seemed to me as though the sun were shining for me alone,
+      as though it were pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my
+      special gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
+      swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
+      destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the people
+      about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an illusion,
+      that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has when he has
+      nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that score with a
+      poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten years on end with
+      politics and law making and is wearing away his life with those trivial
+      preoccupations men call affairs of state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
+      colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
+      ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
+      from the printer&rsquo;s and all smelling of printer&rsquo;s ink, conversations in
+      green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
+      speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one things,
+      the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the grey and
+      gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the purple
+      hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night; tasks which leave
+      you no soul to call your own and rob you of the consciousness of your own
+      identity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, it is so. I have left my own <i>ego</i> behind me there. It is
+      scattered up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports.
+      Industrious junior clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of
+      their beautiful green filing cases. And so I have had to go on living
+      without my <i>ego</i>, which, moreover, is how all politicians have to
+      live. But an <i>ego</i> is a strangely subtle thing. And wonder of
+      wonders! mine came back to me just now on the Pont de la Concorde. &lsquo;Twas
+      he without a doubt and, would you believe it, he had not suffered so very
+      much from his sojourn among those musty papers. The very moment he arrived
+      I found myself again, I recognized my own existence, whereof I had not
+      been conscious these ten years. &ldquo;Ha ha!&rdquo; said I to myself, &ldquo;since I exist,
+      I am just as well pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now
+      to improve this new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover&rsquo;s thoughts in
+      my heart, down the Champs-Elysées.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured steeds of
+      Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds themselves;
+      this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance is marked by
+      their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The carriages flow past
+      endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of lava or molten asphalt,
+      whereon the hats of the women seem borne along like so many flowers, and
+      like everything else one sees in Paris, at once extravagant and pretty. I
+      light up a cigar and looking at nothing, behold everything. So intense is
+      my joy that it scares me. It is the first cigar I have smoked for ten
+      years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun as many as ten a day in my room; but
+      those I scorched, bit, chewed and threw away; I never smoked them. This
+      one I am really and truly smoking and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of
+      poesy spreading grace and charm about it. What an interest I take in all I
+      see. These little shops, which display at regular intervals their motley
+      assortment of wares, fill me with delight. Here especially is one which I
+      cannot forbear stopping to look at. What I chiefly delight to contemplate
+      there is a decanter with lemonade in it. The decanter reflects in
+      miniature on its polished sides the trees around it and the women that
+      pass by and the skies. It has a lemon on the top of it which gives it a
+      sort of oriental air. However, it is not its shape nor its colour that is
+      the attraction in my eyes; I cannot keep my gaze from it because it
+      reminds me of my childhood. At the sight of it, innumerable delightful
+      scenes come thronging into my memory. Once again do I behold those shining
+      hours, those hours divine of early childhood. Ah, what would I not give to
+      be again the little boy of those days and to drink once more a glass of
+      that precious liquid!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/024.jpg" alt="024 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      In that little shop, I find once more, besides the lemonade and the
+      gooseberry syrup, all those divers things wherein my childhood took
+      delight. Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches, belts,
+      scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five to nine
+      years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of a Napoleon. I
+      played that mighty rôle, in my tenpenny soldier&rsquo;s kit, I played it from
+      start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of exile. For, mark
+      you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured prints from Épinal.
+      It was on them that I began to spell out those signs which to the learned
+      reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle. Yes, the sorriest little
+      coloured daub that ever came out of a village in the Vosges consists of
+      print and pictures, and what is the sum and substance of Science after all
+      but just pictures and print?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From those Épinal prints I learned things far finer and more useful than
+      anything I ever got from the little grammar and history books my
+      schoolmasters gave me to pore over. Épinal prints, you see, are stories,
+      and stories are mirrors of destiny. Blessed is the child that is brought
+      up on fairy-tales. His riper years should prove rich in wisdom and
+      imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story <i>The Blue Bird</i>.
+      I know him by his outspread tail. &lsquo;Tis he right enough. It is as much as I
+      can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman&rsquo;s neck
+      and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt I owe
+      him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to him.
+      Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of the Blue
+      Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and parliamentary
+      documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect then that the human
+      soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable metamorphoses and hallowed
+      sorrows, and if, under the spell of such thoughts, I gave to the clause I
+      chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a humaner sense, an added respect
+      for the soul and its rights, and for the universal order of things, that
+      clause would never fail to encounter vigorous opposition in the Chamber.
+      The counsels of the Blue Bird seldom prevailed in the committee stage.
+      Howbeit some did manage to get through Parliament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I now perceive that I am not the only one inspecting the little stall: a
+      little girl has come to a halt in front of the brilliant display. I am
+      looking at her from behind. Her long, bright hair comes tumbling in
+      cascades from under her red velvet hood and spreads out on her broad lace
+      collar and on her dress, which is the same colour as her hood. Impossible
+      to say what is the colour of her hair (there is no colour so beautiful)
+      but one can describe the lights in it; they are bright and pure and
+      changing, fair as the sun&rsquo;s rays, pale as a beam of starlight. Nay, more
+      than that, they shine, yes; but they flow also. They possess the splendour
+      of light, and the charm of pleasant waters. Methinks that, were I a poet,
+      I should write as many sonnets on those tresses as M. José Maria de
+      Heredia composed concerning the Conquerors of Castille d&rsquo;Or. They would
+      not be so fine, but they would be sweeter. The child, so far as I can
+      judge, is between four and five years old. All I can see of her face is
+      the tip of her ear, daintier than the daintiest jewel, and the innocent
+      curve of her cheek. She does not stir; she is holding her hoop in her left
+      hand; her right is at her lips as though she were biting her nails in her
+      eager contemplation. What is it she is gazing at so longingly? The shop
+      contains other things besides the arms and the gear of fighting men. Balls
+      and skipping ropes are suspended from the awning. On the stall are baby
+      dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard, smiling after the manner of
+      idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little six-penny dolls, dressed like
+      servant girls, stretch out their arms, little stumpy arms so flimsy that
+      the least breath of air sets them a-tremble. But the little maid whose
+      hair is made of liquid light, has no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her
+      whole soul hangs upon the lips of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be
+      calling her his mummy. He is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth
+      all by himself. He dominates, he effaces everything else. Once you have
+      beheld him, you see naught else save him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bolt upright in his warm wraps, a little swansdown tucker under his chin,
+      he is stretching out his little chubby arms for some one to take him. He
+      speaks straight to the little maid&rsquo;s heart. He appeals to her by every
+      maternal instinct she possesses. He is enchanting. His face has three
+      little dots, two black ones for the eyes, and one red one for the mouth.
+      But his eyes speak, his mouth invites you. He is alive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Philosophers are a heedless race. They pass by dolls with never a thought.
+      Nevertheless the doll is more than the statue, more than the idol. It
+      finds its way to the heart of woman, long ere she be a woman. It gives her
+      the first thrill of maternity. The doll is a thing august. Wherefore
+      cannot one of our great sculptors be so very kind as to take the trouble
+      to model dolls whose lineaments, coming to life beneath his fingers, would
+      tell of wisdom and of beauty?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the little girl awakens from her silent day-dream. She turns round
+      and shows her violet eyes made bigger still with wonder, her nose which
+      makes you smile to look at it, her tiny nose, quite white, that reminds
+      you of a little pug dog&rsquo;s black one, her solemn mouth, her shapely but too
+      delicate chin, her cheeks a shade too pale. I recognize her. Oh yes! I
+      recognize her with that instinctive certainty that is stronger than all
+      convictions supported by all the proofs imaginable. Oh yes, &lsquo;tis she, &lsquo;tis
+      indeed she and all that remains of the most charming of women. I try to
+      hasten away but I cannot leave her. That hair of living gold, it is her
+      mother&rsquo;s hair; those violet eyes, they are her mother&rsquo;s own; Oh, child of
+      my dreams, child of my despair! I long to gather you to my arms, to steal
+      you, to bear you away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a governess draws near, calls the child and leads her away: &ldquo;Come,
+      Marguerite, come along, it&rsquo;s time to go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Marguerite, casting a look of sad farewell at the baby with its
+      outstretched arms, reluctantly follows in the footsteps of a tall woman
+      clad in black with ostrich feathers in her hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/033.jpg" alt="Endpiece 033 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/034.jpg" alt="034 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      10th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jean, bring me file 117.... Now then, M. Boscheron, let&rsquo;s get this
+      circular done. Take this down: <i>I draw your special attention, M. le
+      Préfet, to the following point. An end must be put at the earliest
+      possible moment to an abuse which, if suffered to continue, would tend to&mdash;tend
+      to&mdash;I draw your special attention to the following point, M. le
+      Préfet. An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse</i>. Take that
+      down, M. Boscheron.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But M. Boscheron, my secretary, respectfully remarks that I keep on
+      dictating the same sentence. Jean deferentially places a file on my table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that, Jean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;File number 117. You asked me to fetch it, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked you for file number 117?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jean gives me an anxious glance and retires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where were we, M. Boscheron?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse . . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right... <i>an abuse which would tend to diminish popular respect
+      for government servants and to transform</i>... transform, what a wealth
+      of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it but
+      a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade the
+      secret recesses of my being.&rdquo; &ldquo;I beg pardon, monsieur?&rdquo; &ldquo;What did you say,
+      M. Boscheron?&rdquo; &ldquo;Please repeat, monsieur; I didn&rsquo;t quite follow you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Monsieur Boscheron? Possibly I was not very clear. Well, well! we
+      will stop there if you like. Give me what I have dictated, I will finish
+      it myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/036.jpg" alt="036 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      M. Boscheron gives me his notes, gathers up his papers, bows and retires.
+      Left alone in my office, I fall to examining the wallpaper with a sort of
+      idiotic minuteness. It has the appearance of green felt with here and
+      there a yellow stain; I begin to draw little men on my paper; I make an
+      effort to write; for the fact is my Chief has asked for the circular three
+      times and has promised the government deputies that it shall go to the
+      prefects forthwith. I am bound to let him have it. I begin reading it
+      through: <i>to diminish popular respect for government servants and to
+      transform them</i>. I make a blot; then with my pen I adorn it with hair.
+      I transform it into a comet. I dream of Marguerite&rsquo;s tresses. The other
+      day, in the Champs-Elysées, little filaments of gold, little delicate
+      spirals stood out from the rest of her graceful tresses, with a singular
+      brightness. You can see their like in fifteenth century miniatures, also
+      in some of an earlier date. Dante says in his <i>Vita Nuova</i>: &ldquo;One day
+      when I was busy drawing angel&rsquo;s heads . . .&rdquo; And now here am I trying to
+      draw angels&rsquo; heads on a government circular. Come now, we must get on with
+      it: <i>government servants and to transform them&mdash;transform them</i>
+      . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single word after that? How is it
+      I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever since I rediscovered my <i>ego</i>
+      on the Pont de la Concorde that evening of the lovely sunset? Transform,
+      did I say? O God of mystery, nature, truth, if she whose name even now
+      after four years I dare not utter, if she died in giving life to
+      Marguerite, I should believe, I should know with the certainty of
+      instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed into the daughter and
+      that they are one and the same being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0007" id="linkimage-0007">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/040.jpg" alt="040 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/042.jpg" alt="042 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      1st November
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      All&rsquo;s well. I have lost my <i>ego</i> again. It has gone back into the
+      green filing cases. Number 117 contains a good part of it. I have finished
+      my circular. It is drawn up in good official style. We have a fine piece
+      of legislation to get off before the holidays. My Chief speaks every day
+      in the House. Every night I correct the proofs of his speeches. If the
+      Blue Bird comes to see me now and again in the small hall of the Palais
+      Bourbon, it is merely to advise me to tone down some rather too forcible
+      expression and he never addresses himself to my imagination. I don&rsquo;t know
+      whether I am living happily or unhappily since I don&rsquo;t know that I am
+      living at all. I do not even recognize my own clothes. I picked up the hat
+      of the Comte de Mérodac a little while ago and wore it for three days
+      without knowing it, yet it is a romantic sombrero-like sort of thing worn
+      nowadays by no one save this elderly nobleman. I cut an astounding figure
+      they told me, but I never noticed myself, and, if by chance I had, I
+      should not have heeded what I saw since it had nothing to do with
+      politics. I am no longer a person; I am a piece of the official machine.
+      To-night I have neither proofs to correct nor official reception to
+      attend. I have put on my slippers. There is always a tiny bit of my <i>ego</i>
+      hidden away in these slippers. I am in my room seated by the fire and I am
+      conscious of being there. By heaven I wonder whether I should know myself
+      in the glass. Let&rsquo;s have a look. Hum! not so very ... I didn&rsquo;t think I was
+      so grave and respectable looking. I quite see that I shall have to take
+      myself seriously. I have been a long time about it, but then it wasn&rsquo;t for
+      me to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am a man of weight and I account myself such. But, alas, I do not know
+      myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
+      tedious business. No, I haven&rsquo;t the smallest desire to hold converse with
+      the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the other
+      hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that little
+      fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against the
+      frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a nice
+      little chap. I feel like calling him and saying &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go and have a game
+      together shall we?&rdquo; But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That little
+      boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead as if I
+      were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For what have we
+      in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me to-day? In what
+      do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
+      over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/046.jpg" alt="046 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
+      time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
+      with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
+      adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
+      battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart like
+      a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to soothe
+      all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the child that
+      I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me; I feel that I
+      can love him without selfishness and weep for him without unmanliness. He
+      is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my innocent simplicities and
+      my boundless hopes. We all of us die in swaddling clothes. Little
+      Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding life, how many times has
+      she not died and what profound depths of irrevocable memories, what a
+      grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not already been delved within
+      her, though she is but five years old. I, a stranger, a passer-by, know
+      more of her life than she does and, in consequence, I am more truly she
+      than she herself. After that let him who will prate of the feeling of
+      identity and the consciousness of self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss of
+      terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
+      instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
+      slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they have
+      called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are only
+      bearable provided we do not think about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/049.jpg" alt="049 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/050.jpg" alt="050 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      5th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front of
+      a toyshop in the Champs-Elysées, the child of her who first awakened in me
+      the sense of beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was unknown
+      to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love. The first
+      time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert to which her
+      father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had heard the finest
+      orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her attired in stately
+      weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only served to accentuate her
+      radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in me feelings which bore, I
+      think, a close resemblance to religious exaltation. I was no longer very
+      young. The uncertainty of my worldly position, dependent as it then was
+      upon the vicissitudes of a political party, combined with my natural
+      timidity to deprive me of all hope of figuring as a successful suitor. I
+      often saw her at her father&rsquo;s and she treated me with an air of open
+      friendliness that did not encourage me to foster higher ambitions. It was
+      clear I did not impress her as the sort of man with whom she could fall in
+      love. As for me, the sight of her and the sound of her voice produced in
+      me such a state of delicious agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled
+      though it be with grief, still avails to make me in love with life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/052.jpg" alt="052 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her always;
+      I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain to wed her.
+      No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my heart. &ldquo;It was not
+      love then,&rdquo; some one will say. I know not what it was, but I know that it
+      filled my soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange to
+      the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
+      sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
+      They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
+      break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
+      remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life; then,
+      one day, she told me she was going to be married. My feelings, as I have
+      said, bear a strong resemblance to religious emotion. They are sad, but in
+      their sadness they still preserve their charm. Grief corrupts them not.
+      From suffering they derive a wholesome bitterness that lends them
+      strength. I listened to her with that gentle courage which comes with
+      renunciation. She was marrying a man senior to myself, a widower, almost
+      an old man, whose birth and fortune had marked him out for the public
+      career in which he had displayed a haughtiness of disposition and much
+      misplaced courage. Although I moved in a lower sphere, I came in contact
+      with him on several important occasions. I belonged to a political group
+      with views very similar to his own, but we had never been able to meet
+      without considerable friction and, although the newspapers treated us with
+      the same approval or, as was more often the case, with the same hostility,
+      we were not friends, far from it, and we avoided each other with sedulous
+      care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was present at the wedding. I saw, and I shall ever see Marie, wearing
+      her white dress and lace veil. She was a little pale and very lovely. I
+      was struck, without apparent reason, by the impression of fragility with
+      which this girl who was animated by so poetic a soul seemed to give one.
+      This impression, which I think occurred to no one but myself, was only too
+      well founded. I never saw Marie again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She died after three years of married life, leaving a little girl ten
+      months old. An indescribable feeling of tender affection has always drawn
+      me to this child, to Marie&rsquo;s Marguerite. An unconquerable desire to see
+      her took possession of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was being brought up at &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; near Melun, where her
+      father had a château standing in the midst of a magnificent park. One day
+      I went to &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and wandered for hours, like a thief,
+      about the park bound-aries. At last, through a gap in the trees, I caught
+      sight of Marguerite in the arms of her nurse, who was dressed in black.
+      She was wearing a hat with white plumes and an embroidered pelisse. I
+      cannot say in what respect she differed from any other child, but I
+      thought she was the fairest in the world. It was autumn. The wind that was
+      sighing in the trees was whirling the dead leaves about in little eddies
+      as they floated to earth. Dead leaves covered all the long avenue in which
+      the little white-robed child was being carried up and down. An immense
+      sadness took possession of me. At the edge of a bed of flowers as white as
+      the raiment of Marguerite, an old gardener who was gathering up the fallen
+      leaves saluted his little mistress with a smile and, with his hand on his
+      rake and hat in hand, spoke to her with the gentle gaiety of old men who
+      are not overburdened with their thoughts. But she paid no heed to him.
+      With her little hand like to a star she sought her nurse&rsquo;s breast. As I
+      hurried away with grief in my heart, the nurse resumed her walk and I
+      heard the sound of the dead leaves sighing sorrowfully beneath her steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/058.jpg" alt="058 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/060.jpg" alt="060 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      10th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The President of the Chamber rises and says: &ldquo;The motion proposed by
+      Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; is now put.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prime Minister, without quitting his seat says: &ldquo;The Government does
+      not assent to the motion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The President rings his bell and says: &ldquo;A ballot has been demanded. A
+      ballot will therefore be taken. Those in favour of Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+      and &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&lsquo;s motion must place a white paper in the urn;
+      those who are against it, a blue paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a great movement in the hall. The deputies poured out in a
+      disorderly mob into the corridors, while the ushers passed the white metal
+      urn along the tiers of seats. The corridors were full of the sound of
+      shuffling feet, and of shouting and gesticulating people. Grave looking
+      young men and excited old ones went passing by. The air was pierced with
+      the sound of voices calling out figures:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleven votes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, nine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are being checked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight against.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not at all; eight for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, the amendment is carried?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Government is beaten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The President&rsquo;s bell is heard in the corridors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly the hall fills again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The President standing up with a paper in his hand rings his bell for the
+      last time and says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The following is the result of the ballot on the motion proposed by
+      Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;. Number of votes
+      470; for the motion 239 ; against 231. The motion is carried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an immense sensation. The Ministers get up and leave their seats.
+      Two or three friends shake them timidly by the hand. It&rsquo;s all over, they
+      are beaten. They go under and I with them. I no longer count. I make up my
+      mind to it. To say that I am happy would be to go too far. But it spells
+      the end of my worries and bothers and toils. I have regained my freedom,
+      but not voluntarily. Repose and liberty, I&rsquo;ve got them back again, but it
+      is to my defeat that I owe them. An honourable defeat it is true, but
+      painful all the same because our ideas suffer with ourselves. How many
+      things are involved in our fall, alas. Economy, public security,
+      tranquillity of conscience and that spirit of prudence, that continuity of
+      policy, which gives a nation its strength. I hurried away to shake hands
+      with the Chief of my department, proud of having rendered faithful service
+      to so upright a leader. Then, pushing my way through the crowd that had
+      gathered about the precincts of the Palais Bourbon, I crossed the Seine
+      and made my way slowly towards the Madeleine. At the top of the boulevard
+      there was a barrow of flowers drawn up alongside the kerb. Between the two
+      shafts was a young girl making up bunches of violets. I went up to her and
+      asked her for a bunch. I then saw a little girl of four sitting on the
+      barrow amid the flowers. With her baby fingers she was trying to make
+      bunches like her mother. She raised her head at my approach and, with a
+      smile, held out all the flowers she had in her hands. When she had given
+      them all to me, she blew kisses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/064.jpg" alt="064 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      I was extremely flattered. &ldquo;I must have a kindly look about me,&rdquo; I said to
+      myself, &ldquo;for a child to smile a welcome at me like that. What is your
+      name?&rdquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marguerite,&rdquo; replied her mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was half-past six. There was a news-vendor&rsquo;s hard by. I bought a paper.
+      As soon as I glanced at it I saw that I was in for a wigging. The
+      political editor, having referred to my Chief as an individual of ill
+      omen, spoke of me too, on the first page, as a sinister creature. But,
+      after Marguerite&rsquo;s kisses, I could not believe it. I felt at once a
+      lightness and a sort of emptiness at heart; both glad and sorrowful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A week later found me on my way, to &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; near Melun,
+      where I had taken a little house hard by the Château of Marguerite&rsquo;s
+      upbringing. In my eyes it was the fairest region in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we approached the station I looked out of the carriage window. The
+      silver river flowed in graceful curves between willows, until it vanished
+      from the sight. But long after it was lost to view one could divine its
+      course by the rows of poplars which lined its banks. A weathercock and two
+      towers visible amid the trees marked the site of the town. Then I
+      exclaimed, &ldquo;Here is the resting place for me, here will I lay my head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/067.jpg" alt="067 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/068.jpg" alt="068 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      25th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The walk I love best is the walk to Saint-Jean, for there, about a hundred
+      yards from the town is a little wood, or rather a little half-wild cluster
+      of hornbeams, maples, limes and lilac bushes, a bouquet that murmurs in
+      the breeze. The very first day I discovered it, I felt its charm. I
+      determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to know it tree by tree,
+      to search out its humblest plants, its vetches, its saxifrages, and to see
+      whether there was no Solomon&rsquo;s seal to be found growing beneath the shade
+      of the big trees. I kept my word and now I am beginning to make
+      acquaintance with the flora and fauna of my little wood. I had been
+      reclining on the grass to-day for the space of an hour, book in hand, when
+      I heard some one crying in a faint voice. I looked up and beheld a little
+      girl standing beside an elderly man and weeping. The man was undeniably
+      old. His face was long and pallid. There was an expression of sadness in
+      his eyes and his mouth drooped mournfully. He had a skipping-rope in his
+      hand and was looking fixedly at the child. Then he turned aside to brush
+      away a tear from his cheek. It was then that I beheld him full face and
+      saw that he was Marguerite&rsquo;s father. I was shocked at the great change
+      that illness and sorrow had wrought in his haughty mien. Despair was
+      graven on his countenance and he seemed to be calling for help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/070.jpg" alt="070 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      I went up to him and, in response to my offer to assist him in any way
+      possible, he explained with some embarrassment that a ball with which his
+      little girl had been playing had got caught in a tree and that his stick,
+      which he had thrown up in order to dislodge it, had become entangled in
+      the branches. He was at his wit&rsquo;s end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only a few years before, this same man had circumvented the policy of
+      England and imparted a vigorous stimulus to French diplomacy in Europe.
+      Then he fell with honour, and was followed in his retirement by a profound
+      but honourable unpopularity. And now, behold his powers are unequal to the
+      task of dislodging a ball from a tree. Such is the frailty of man. As for
+      his daughter, Marie&rsquo;s daughter, a sort of presentiment forbade me to look
+      in her face. And then when at length I did look at her, I could not tear
+      myself away from such a sorrowful object of contemplation. She was no
+      longer the little pink and white child I had seen in the Champs-Elysées;
+      she had grown taller and thinner, and her face was wan as a waxen taper.
+      Her languid eyes were encircled with blue rings. And her temples . . .
+      what invisible hand had laid those two sad violets upon her temples?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There! there! there!&rdquo; cried the old man as he stretched forth a trembling
+      arm which pointed aimlessly in all directions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first thing to be done was to help him. By means of a stone which I
+      threw up into the tree, I soon managed to bring the ball down. X . . .
+      witnessed its fall with childish delight. He had not recognized me. I
+      hurriedly escaped to spare him the trouble of thanking me and myself the
+      agony of seeing the change that had taken place in Marie&rsquo;s daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/074.jpg" alt="074 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/076.jpg" alt="076 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      10th August
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I seldom go out. I am no longer moved by the beauty of things. Or to speak
+      more truly, the more pleasurable and splendid aspects of nature give me
+      pain. All day long I sully sheet after sheet of paper and beguile the
+      tedious hours with the half-faded recollections of my childhood. What I am
+      writing will be burned. I should be ashamed that pages, tear-stained and
+      dream-haunted, should fall beneath the eyes of grave, sober-minded folk.
+      What would they see in them? Naught but childish faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/078.jpg" alt="078 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      20th August
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To-dau I went for a stroll by the river in whose blue waters are mirrored
+      the willows and the houses that befringe its banks. There is a seductive
+      charm about running waters. They bear along with them as they flow all
+      those idlers who love to dream their time away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The river lured me as far as the château de- &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; which
+      had witnessed the betrothal and the death of Marie, and the birth of
+      Marguerite. My heart tolled a knell within me when I saw once more that
+      peaceful abode, which, despite the scenes of sorrow enacted within its
+      walls, speaks, with its white pillared façade, of naught save elegant
+      opulence and luxurious repose. I was so overcome that, to save myself from
+      falling, I clung to the bars of the park gate and gazed at the wide lawns
+      which stretched away as far as the flight of steps which the hem of
+      Marie&rsquo;s robe had kissed so often. I had been there some minutes when the
+      gate was opened and X ... came out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this occasion, also, he was accompanied by his child: but this time she
+      was not walking. She was lying in a perambulator which was being pushed by
+      a governess. With her head resting on an embroidered pillow in the shadow
+      of the lowered hood, she resembled one of those little waxen images of
+      saint or martyr, embellished with silver filigree, on whose wounds and
+      gems the nuns of Spain are wont to pore in the solitude of their cells.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/080.jpg" alt="080 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Her father, elegantly dressed, presented a faded, tear-stained
+      countenance. He advanced towards me with little faltering steps, took me
+      by the hand and led me to his little girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said in the tone of a child asking a favour, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t
+      think she has changed since you last saw her, do you? It was the day she
+      threw her ball up into the tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The perambulator which we were following in silence came to a halt in the
+      Bois Saint-Jean. The governess lowered the hood. Marguerite lay with her
+      head thrown back, her eyes big with terror, and she was stretching out her
+      arms to push aside something that we could not see. Oh, I guessed well
+      enough what invisible hand it was. The same hand that had touched the
+      mother was now laid upon the child. I fell on my knees. But the phantom
+      departed and Marguerite, raising her head, lay resting peacefully. I
+      gathered some flowers and laid them reverently beside her. She smiled.
+      Seeing her come back to life I gave her more flowers and sang to her,
+      endeavouring to beguile her. The air and the feeling of happiness she now
+      experienced brought back to her that desire to live which had forsaken
+      her. At the end of an hour her cheeks were almost rosy. When it grew cool
+      and we had to take the little suffering child back to the château again,
+      her father took my hand as we parted and, pressing it, said in suppliant
+      tones:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come again to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/084.jpg" alt="084 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/086.jpg" alt="086 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      21st August
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I returned next day. On the steps of the Empire château I encountered the
+      family doctor. He is a spare, elderly man whom you meet wherever there is
+      good music to be heard. He seems like a man perpetually listening to the
+      harmonies of some inward concert. He is for ever under the spell of sounds
+      and lives by his ear alone. He is specially noted for his treatment of
+      nervous complaints. Some say he is a genius; others that he is mad.
+      Certainly there is something peculiar about him. When I saw him he was
+      coming down the steps; his feet, his finger and his lips moving in time to
+      some intricate measure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, doctor,&rdquo; I said with an involuntary quaver in my voice, &ldquo;and how is
+      your little patient?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She means to live,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will pull her through for us, won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; I said eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you she means to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really want
+      to and that we do not die save with our own consent?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the
+      gate, his head bowed as if in thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; he said again, &ldquo;but they must really want to and not merely
+      think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none
+      save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say
+      they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in which
+      all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is unconscious,
+      it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and when it fails we
+      cease to be. The world <i>wills</i>, otherwise it would not exist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked on a few steps farther.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak
+      tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads,
+      &ldquo;if that fellow there had not <i>willed</i> to grow, I should like to know
+      what power could have made him do so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I had ceased to listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you have hopes,&rdquo; I said at length, &ldquo;that Marguerite . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was a stubborn little old fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He murmured as he walked away: &ldquo;The Will&rsquo;s crowning Victory is Love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And I stood and watched him as he departed with little quick steps,
+      beating time to a tune that was running in his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went quickly back to the château and found little Marguerite. The moment
+      I saw her, I realized that she had the will to live. She was still very
+      pale and very thin, but her eyes had more colour in them and were not so
+      big, and her lips, lately so dead-looking and so silent, were gay with
+      prattling talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are late,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Come here, see! I have a theatre and actors.
+      Play me a beautiful piece. They say that &lsquo;Hop o&rsquo; my Thumb&rsquo; is nice. Play
+      &lsquo;Hop o&rsquo; my Thumb&rsquo; for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/090.jpg" alt="090 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure I did not refuse. However, I encountered great
+      difficulties at the very outset of my undertaking. I pointed out to
+      Marguerite that the only actors she had were princes and princesses, and
+      that we wanted woodmen, cooks and a certain number of folks of all sorts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought for a moment and then said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A prince dressed like a cook; that one there looks like a cook, don&rsquo;t you
+      think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, we&rsquo;ll make woodmen and cooks out of all the princes we have
+      over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that&rsquo;s what we did. O Wisdom, what a day we spent together!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many others like it followed in its train. I watched Marguerite taking an
+      ever firmer hold on life. Now she is quite well again. I had a share in
+      this miracle. I discovered a tiny portion of that gift wherein the
+      apostles so richly abounded when they healed the sick by the laying on of
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Editor&rsquo;s Note</i>.&mdash;I found this manuscript in a train on the
+      Northern Railway. I give it to the public without alteration of any sort,
+      save that, as the names were those of well-known persons, I have thought
+      it well to suppress them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anatole France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/093.jpg" alt="093 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,1273 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Marguerite
+       1921
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Illustrator: Simeon
+
+Translator: J. Lewis May
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25406]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGUERITE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE
+
+By Anatole France
+
+Translated From The French By J. Lewis May
+
+With Twenty-Nine Original Woodcuts By Simeon
+
+London, John Lane Company, MCMXXI
+
+
+[Illustration: titlepage 010]
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY LETTER
+
+Publish Marguerite, dear Monsieur Andre Coq, if you so desire, but pray
+relieve me from all responsibility in the matter.
+
+It would argue too much literary conceit on my part were I anxious to
+restore it to the light of day. It would argue, perhaps, still more did
+I endeavour to keep it in obscurity. You will not succeed in wresting it
+for long from the eternal oblivion where-unto it is destined. Ay me, how
+old it is! I had lost all recollection of it. I have just read it over,
+without fear or favour, as I should a work unknown to me, and it does
+not seem to me that I have lighted upon a masterpiece. It would ill
+beseem me to say more about it than that. My only pleasure as I read it
+was derived from the proof it afforded that, even in those far-off days,
+when I was writing this little trifle, I was no great lover of the Third
+Republic with its pinchbeck virtues, its militarist imperialism, its
+ideas of conquest, its love of money, its contempt for the handicrafts,
+its unswerving predilection for the unlovely. Its leaders caused me
+terrible misgivings. And the event has surpassed my apprehensions.
+
+But it was not in my calculations to make myself a laughing-stock, by
+taking Marguerite as a text for generalizations on French politics of
+the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+
+The specimens of type and the woodcuts you have shown me promise a very
+comely little book.
+
+Believe me, dear Monsieur Coq,
+
+Yours sincerely,
+
+Anatole France.
+
+La Bechellerie, 16th April, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+MARGUERITE
+
+[Illustration: 018]
+
+
+
+
+5th July
+
+As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five o'clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
+my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
+gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper
+an invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the
+direction of the Champs-Elysees, victorias and landaus kept rolling by.
+In the shadow of the lowered carriage-hoods, women's faces gleamed clear
+and radiant and I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by
+like hopes vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman
+as she passed by left me with an impression of light and perfume.
+I think a man, if he is wise, will not ask much more than that of a
+beautiful woman. A gleam and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even
+less behind it. Moreover, that day, if Fortune herself had run with her
+wheel a-spinning before my very nose along the pavement of the Pont
+de la Concorde, I should not have so much as stretched forth an arm to
+pluck her by her golden hair. I lacked nothing that day; all was mine.
+It was five o'clock and I was free till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free
+to saunter at will, to breathe at my ease for two hours, to look on at
+things and not have to talk, to let my thoughts wander as I listed. All
+was mine, I say again. My happiness was making me a selfish man. I
+gazed at everything about me as though it were all a picture, a splendid
+moving pageant, arranged for my own particular delectation. It seemed
+to me as though the sun were shining for me alone, as though it were
+pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my special
+gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
+swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
+destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the
+people about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an
+illusion, that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has
+when he has nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that
+score with a poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten
+years on end with politics and law making and is wearing away his life
+with those trivial preoccupations men call affairs of state.
+
+In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
+colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
+ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
+from the printer's and all smelling of printer's ink, conversations
+in green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
+speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one
+things, the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the
+grey and gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the
+purple hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night;
+tasks which leave you no soul to call your own and rob you of the
+consciousness of your own identity.
+
+Yes, it is so. I have left my own _ego_ behind me there. It is scattered
+up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports. Industrious junior
+clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of their beautiful green
+filing cases. And so I have had to go on living without my _ego_,
+which, moreover, is how all politicians have to live. But an _ego_ is a
+strangely subtle thing. And wonder of wonders! mine came back to me just
+now on the Pont de la Concorde. 'Twas he without a doubt and, would
+you believe it, he had not suffered so very much from his sojourn among
+those musty papers. The very moment he arrived I found myself again, I
+recognized my own existence, whereof I had not been conscious these
+ten years. "Ha ha!" said I to myself, "since I exist, I am just as well
+pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now to improve this
+new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover's thoughts in my heart, down
+the Champs-Elysees."
+
+And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured
+steeds of Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds
+themselves; this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance
+is marked by their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The
+carriages flow past endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of
+lava or molten asphalt, whereon the hats of the women seem borne along
+like so many flowers, and like everything else one sees in Paris, at
+once extravagant and pretty. I light up a cigar and looking at nothing,
+behold everything. So intense is my joy that it scares me. It is the
+first cigar I have smoked for ten years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun
+as many as ten a day in my room; but those I scorched, bit, chewed and
+threw away; I never smoked them. This one I am really and truly smoking
+and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of poesy spreading grace and charm
+about it. What an interest I take in all I see. These little shops,
+which display at regular intervals their motley assortment of wares,
+fill me with delight. Here especially is one which I cannot forbear
+stopping to look at. What I chiefly delight to contemplate there is a
+decanter with lemonade in it. The decanter reflects in miniature on its
+polished sides the trees around it and the women that pass by and the
+skies. It has a lemon on the top of it which gives it a sort of oriental
+air. However, it is not its shape nor its colour that is the attraction
+in my eyes; I cannot keep my gaze from it because it reminds me of
+my childhood. At the sight of it, innumerable delightful scenes come
+thronging into my memory. Once again do I behold those shining hours,
+those hours divine of early childhood. Ah, what would I not give to be
+again the little boy of those days and to drink once more a glass of
+that precious liquid!
+
+[Illustration: 024]
+
+In that little shop, I find once more, besides the lemonade and the
+gooseberry syrup, all those divers things wherein my childhood took
+delight. Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches,
+belts, scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five
+to nine years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of
+a Napoleon. I played that mighty role, in my tenpenny soldier's kit,
+I played it from start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of
+exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured
+prints from Epinal. It was on them that I began to spell out those signs
+which to the learned reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle.
+Yes, the sorriest little coloured daub that ever came out of a village
+in the Vosges consists of print and pictures, and what is the sum and
+substance of Science after all but just pictures and print?
+
+From those Epinal prints I learned things far finer and more useful
+than anything I ever got from the little grammar and history books my
+schoolmasters gave me to pore over. Epinal prints, you see, are stories,
+and stories are mirrors of destiny. Blessed is the child that is brought
+up on fairy-tales. His riper years should prove rich in wisdom and
+imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story _The Blue Bird_. I
+know him by his outspread tail. 'Tis he right enough. It is as much as
+I can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman's
+neck and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt
+I owe him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to
+him. Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of
+the Blue Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and
+parliamentary documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect
+then that the human soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable
+metamorphoses and hallowed sorrows, and if, under the spell of such
+thoughts, I gave to the clause I chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a
+humaner sense, an added respect for the soul and its rights, and for
+the universal order of things, that clause would never fail to encounter
+vigorous opposition in the Chamber. The counsels of the Blue Bird seldom
+prevailed in the committee stage. Howbeit some did manage to get through
+Parliament.
+
+I now perceive that I am not the only one inspecting the little stall:
+a little girl has come to a halt in front of the brilliant display. I
+am looking at her from behind. Her long, bright hair comes tumbling in
+cascades from under her red velvet hood and spreads out on her broad
+lace collar and on her dress, which is the same colour as her hood.
+Impossible to say what is the colour of her hair (there is no colour so
+beautiful) but one can describe the lights in it; they are bright and
+pure and changing, fair as the sun's rays, pale as a beam of starlight.
+Nay, more than that, they shine, yes; but they flow also. They possess
+the splendour of light, and the charm of pleasant waters. Methinks that,
+were I a poet, I should write as many sonnets on those tresses as M.
+Jose Maria de Heredia composed concerning the Conquerors of Castille
+d'Or. They would not be so fine, but they would be sweeter. The child,
+so far as I can judge, is between four and five years old. All I can see
+of her face is the tip of her ear, daintier than the daintiest jewel,
+and the innocent curve of her cheek. She does not stir; she is holding
+her hoop in her left hand; her right is at her lips as though she were
+biting her nails in her eager contemplation. What is it she is gazing
+at so longingly? The shop contains other things besides the arms and the
+gear of fighting men. Balls and skipping ropes are suspended from the
+awning. On the stall are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard,
+smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little
+six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms,
+little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them
+a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has
+no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips
+of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. He
+is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth all by himself. He
+dominates, he effaces everything else. Once you have beheld him, you see
+naught else save him.
+
+Bolt upright in his warm wraps, a little swansdown tucker under his
+chin, he is stretching out his little chubby arms for some one to take
+him. He speaks straight to the little maid's heart. He appeals to her
+by every maternal instinct she possesses. He is enchanting. His face has
+three little dots, two black ones for the eyes, and one red one for the
+mouth. But his eyes speak, his mouth invites you. He is alive.
+
+Philosophers are a heedless race. They pass by dolls with never a
+thought. Nevertheless the doll is more than the statue, more than the
+idol. It finds its way to the heart of woman, long ere she be a woman.
+It gives her the first thrill of maternity. The doll is a thing august.
+Wherefore cannot one of our great sculptors be so very kind as to take
+the trouble to model dolls whose lineaments, coming to life beneath his
+fingers, would tell of wisdom and of beauty?
+
+At last the little girl awakens from her silent day-dream. She turns
+round and shows her violet eyes made bigger still with wonder, her nose
+which makes you smile to look at it, her tiny nose, quite white, that
+reminds you of a little pug dog's black one, her solemn mouth, her
+shapely but too delicate chin, her cheeks a shade too pale. I recognize
+her. Oh yes! I recognize her with that instinctive certainty that is
+stronger than all convictions supported by all the proofs imaginable. Oh
+yes, 'tis she, 'tis indeed she and all that remains of the most charming
+of women. I try to hasten away but I cannot leave her. That hair of
+living gold, it is her mother's hair; those violet eyes, they are her
+mother's own; Oh, child of my dreams, child of my despair! I long to
+gather you to my arms, to steal you, to bear you away.
+
+But a governess draws near, calls the child and leads her away: "Come,
+Marguerite, come along, it's time to go home."
+
+And Marguerite, casting a look of sad farewell at the baby with its
+outstretched arms, reluctantly follows in the footsteps of a tall woman
+clad in black with ostrich feathers in her hat.
+
+[Illustration: Endpiece 033]
+
+
+[Illustration: 034]
+
+
+
+
+10th July
+
+"Jean, bring me file 117.... Now then, M. Boscheron, let's get this
+circular done. Take this down: _I draw your special attention, M. le
+Prefet, to the following point. An end must be put at the earliest
+possible moment to an abuse which, if suffered to continue, would tend
+to--tend to--I draw your special attention to the following point, M. le
+Prefet. An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse_. Take that
+down, M. Boscheron."
+
+But M. Boscheron, my secretary, respectfully remarks that I keep on
+dictating the same sentence. Jean deferentially places a file on my
+table.
+
+"What's that, Jean?"
+
+"File number 117. You asked me to fetch it, sir."
+
+"I asked you for file number 117?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Jean gives me an anxious glance and retires.
+
+"Where were we, M. Boscheron?"
+
+"An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse . . . ."
+
+"That's right... _an abuse which would tend to diminish popular respect
+for government servants and to transform_... transform, what a wealth
+of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it
+but a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade
+the secret recesses of my being." "I beg pardon, monsieur?" "What did
+you say, M. Boscheron?" "Please repeat, monsieur; I didn't quite follow
+you."
+
+"Really, Monsieur Boscheron? Possibly I was not very clear. Well, well!
+we will stop there if you like. Give me what I have dictated, I will
+finish it myself."
+
+[Illustration: 036]
+
+M. Boscheron gives me his notes, gathers up his papers, bows and
+retires. Left alone in my office, I fall to examining the wallpaper with
+a sort of idiotic minuteness. It has the appearance of green felt with
+here and there a yellow stain; I begin to draw little men on my paper;
+I make an effort to write; for the fact is my Chief has asked for the
+circular three times and has promised the government deputies that it
+shall go to the prefects forthwith. I am bound to let him have it. I
+begin reading it through: _to diminish popular respect for government
+servants and to transform them_. I make a blot; then with my pen I
+adorn it with hair. I transform it into a comet. I dream of Marguerite's
+tresses. The other day, in the Champs-Elysees, little filaments of gold,
+little delicate spirals stood out from the rest of her graceful tresses,
+with a singular brightness. You can see their like in fifteenth century
+miniatures, also in some of an earlier date. Dante says in his _Vita
+Nuova_: "One day when I was busy drawing angel's heads . . ." And now
+here am I trying to draw angels' heads on a government circular. Come
+now, we must get on with it: _government servants and to transform
+them--transform them_ . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single
+word after that? How is it I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever
+since I rediscovered my _ego_ on the Pont de la Concorde that evening
+of the lovely sunset? Transform, did I say? O God of mystery, nature,
+truth, if she whose name even now after four years I dare not utter, if
+she died in giving life to Marguerite, I should believe, I should know
+with the certainty of instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed
+into the daughter and that they are one and the same being.
+
+[Illustration: 040]
+
+
+[Illustration: 042]
+
+
+
+
+1st November
+
+All's well. I have lost my _ego_ again. It has gone back into the green
+filing cases. Number 117 contains a good part of it. I have finished my
+circular. It is drawn up in good official style. We have a fine piece of
+legislation to get off before the holidays. My Chief speaks every day in
+the House. Every night I correct the proofs of his speeches. If the
+Blue Bird comes to see me now and again in the small hall of the Palais
+Bourbon, it is merely to advise me to tone down some rather too forcible
+expression and he never addresses himself to my imagination. I don't
+know whether I am living happily or unhappily since I don't know that
+I am living at all. I do not even recognize my own clothes. I picked up
+the hat of the Comte de Merodac a little while ago and wore it for three
+days without knowing it, yet it is a romantic sombrero-like
+sort of thing worn nowadays by no one save this elderly nobleman. I cut
+an astounding figure they told me, but I never noticed myself, and,
+if by chance I had, I should not have heeded what I saw since it had
+nothing to do with politics. I am no longer a person; I am a piece of
+the official machine. To-night I have neither proofs to correct nor
+official reception to attend. I have put on my slippers. There is always
+a tiny bit of my _ego_ hidden away in these slippers. I am in my room
+seated by the fire and I am conscious of being there. By heaven I wonder
+whether I should know myself in the glass. Let's have a look. Hum! not
+so very ... I didn't think I was so grave and respectable looking. I
+quite see that I shall have to take myself seriously. I have been a long
+time about it, but then it wasn't for me to begin.
+
+I am a man of weight and I account myself such. But, alas, I do not know
+myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
+tedious business. No, I haven't the smallest desire to hold converse
+with the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the
+other hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that
+little fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against
+the frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a
+nice little chap. I feel like calling him and saying "Let's go and have
+a game together shall we?" But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That
+little boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead
+as if I were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For
+what have we in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me
+to-day? In what do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?
+
+We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
+over again.
+
+[Illustration: 046]
+
+I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
+time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
+with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
+adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
+battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart
+like a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to
+soothe all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the
+child that I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me;
+I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without
+unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my
+innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in
+swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding
+life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of
+irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not
+already been delved within her, though she is but five years old. I,
+a stranger, a passer-by, know more of her life than she does and, in
+consequence, I am more truly she than she herself. After that let him
+who will prate of the feeling of identity and the consciousness of self.
+
+Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss
+of terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
+instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
+slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they
+have called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are
+only bearable provided we do not think about them.
+
+[Illustration: 049]
+
+
+[Illustration: 050]
+
+
+
+
+5th July
+
+It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front
+of a toyshop in the Champs-Elysees, the child of her who first awakened
+in me the sense of beauty.
+
+I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was
+unknown to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love.
+The first time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert
+to which her father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had
+heard the finest orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her
+attired in stately weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only
+served to accentuate her radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in
+me feelings which bore, I think, a close resemblance to religious
+exaltation. I was no longer very young. The uncertainty of my worldly
+position, dependent as it then was upon the vicissitudes of a political
+party, combined with my natural timidity to deprive me of all hope of
+figuring as a successful suitor. I often saw her at her father's and she
+treated me with an air of open friendliness that did not encourage me to
+foster higher ambitions. It was clear I did not impress her as the sort
+of man with whom she could fall in love. As for me, the sight of her
+and the sound of her voice produced in me such a state of delicious
+agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled though it be with grief,
+still avails to make me in love with life.
+
+[Illustration: 052]
+
+Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her
+always; I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain
+to wed her. No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my
+heart. "It was not love then," some one will say. I know not what it
+was, but I know that it filled my soul.
+
+Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange
+to the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
+sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
+They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
+break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
+remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life;
+then, one day, she told me she was going to be married. My feelings, as
+I have said, bear a strong resemblance to religious emotion. They
+are sad, but in their sadness they still preserve their charm. Grief
+corrupts them not. From suffering they derive a wholesome bitterness
+that lends them strength. I listened to her with that gentle courage
+which comes with renunciation. She was marrying a man senior to myself,
+a widower, almost an old man, whose birth and fortune had marked him
+out for the public career in which he had displayed a haughtiness of
+disposition and much misplaced courage. Although I moved in a lower
+sphere, I came in contact with him on several important occasions. I
+belonged to a political group with views very similar to his own, but we
+had never been able to meet without considerable friction and, although
+the newspapers treated us with the same approval or, as was more often
+the case, with the same hostility, we were not friends, far from it, and
+we avoided each other with sedulous care.
+
+I was present at the wedding. I saw, and I shall ever see Marie, wearing
+her white dress and lace veil. She was a little pale and very lovely. I
+was struck, without apparent reason, by the impression of fragility with
+which this girl who was animated by so poetic a soul seemed to give one.
+This impression, which I think occurred to no one but myself, was only
+too well founded. I never saw Marie again.
+
+She died after three years of married life, leaving a little girl ten
+months old. An indescribable feeling of tender affection has always
+drawn me to this child, to Marie's Marguerite. An unconquerable desire
+to see her took possession of me.
+
+She was being brought up at ------ near Melun, where her father had a
+chateau standing in the midst of a magnificent park. One day I went to
+------ and wandered for hours, like a thief, about the park bound-aries.
+At last, through a gap in the trees, I caught sight of Marguerite in the
+arms of her nurse, who was dressed in black. She was wearing a hat with
+white plumes and an embroidered pelisse. I cannot say in what respect
+she differed from any other child, but I thought she was the fairest
+in the world. It was autumn. The wind that was sighing in the trees
+was whirling the dead leaves about in little eddies as they floated
+to earth. Dead leaves covered all the long avenue in which the little
+white-robed child was being carried up and down. An immense sadness
+took possession of me. At the edge of a bed of flowers as white as the
+raiment of Marguerite, an old gardener who was gathering up the fallen
+leaves saluted his little mistress with a smile and, with his hand on
+his rake and hat in hand, spoke to her with the gentle gaiety of old men
+who are not overburdened with their thoughts. But she paid no heed to
+him. With her little hand like to a star she sought her nurse's breast.
+As I hurried away with grief in my heart, the nurse resumed her walk
+and I heard the sound of the dead leaves sighing sorrowfully beneath her
+steps.
+
+[Illustration: 058]
+
+
+[Illustration: 060]
+
+
+
+
+10th July
+
+The President of the Chamber rises and says: "The motion proposed by
+Messrs. ------ and ------ is now put."
+
+The Prime Minister, without quitting his seat says: "The Government does
+not assent to the motion."
+
+The President rings his bell and says: "A ballot has been demanded. A
+ballot will therefore be taken. Those in favour of Messrs. ------ and
+------'s motion must place a white paper in the urn; those who are
+against it, a blue paper."
+
+There was a great movement in the hall. The deputies poured out in a
+disorderly mob into the corridors, while the ushers passed the white
+metal urn along the tiers of seats. The corridors were full of the
+sound of shuffling feet, and of shouting and gesticulating people. Grave
+looking young men and excited old ones went passing by. The air was
+pierced with the sound of voices calling out figures:
+
+"Eleven votes."
+
+"No, nine."
+
+"They are being checked."
+
+"Eight against."
+
+"No, not at all; eight for."
+
+"What, the amendment is carried?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"The Government is beaten?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+The President's bell is heard in the corridors.
+
+Slowly the hall fills again.
+
+The President standing up with a paper in his hand rings his bell for
+the last time and says:
+
+"The following is the result of the ballot on the motion proposed by
+Messrs. ------ and ------. Number of votes 470; for the motion 239 ;
+against 231. The motion is carried."
+
+There is an immense sensation. The Ministers get up and leave their
+seats. Two or three friends shake them timidly by the hand. It's all
+over, they are beaten. They go under and I with them. I no longer count.
+I make up my mind to it. To say that I am happy would be to go too
+far. But it spells the end of my worries and bothers and toils. I have
+regained my freedom, but not voluntarily. Repose and liberty, I've got
+them back again, but it is to my defeat that I owe them. An honourable
+defeat it is true, but painful all the same because our ideas suffer
+with ourselves. How many things are involved in our fall, alas.
+Economy, public security, tranquillity of conscience and that spirit of
+prudence, that continuity of policy, which gives a nation its strength.
+I hurried away to shake hands with the Chief of my department, proud of
+having rendered faithful service to so upright a leader. Then, pushing
+my way through the crowd that had gathered about the precincts of the
+Palais Bourbon, I crossed the Seine and made my way slowly towards the
+Madeleine. At the top of the boulevard there was a barrow of flowers
+drawn up alongside the kerb. Between the two shafts was a young girl
+making up bunches of violets. I went up to her and asked her for a
+bunch. I then saw a little girl of four sitting on the barrow amid the
+flowers. With her baby fingers she was trying to make bunches like her
+mother. She raised her head at my approach and, with a smile, held out
+all the flowers she had in her hands. When she had given them all to me,
+she blew kisses.
+
+[Illustration: 064]
+
+I was extremely flattered. "I must have a kindly look about me," I said
+to myself, "for a child to smile a welcome at me like that. What is your
+name?" I asked her.
+
+"Marguerite," replied her mother.
+
+It was half-past six. There was a news-vendor's hard by. I bought a
+paper. As soon as I glanced at it I saw that I was in for a wigging. The
+political editor, having referred to my Chief as an individual of ill
+omen, spoke of me too, on the first page, as a sinister creature. But,
+after Marguerite's kisses, I could not believe it. I felt at once a
+lightness and a sort of emptiness at heart; both glad and sorrowful.
+
+A week later found me on my way, to ------ near Melun, where I had taken
+a little house hard by the Chateau of Marguerite's upbringing. In my
+eyes it was the fairest region in the world.
+
+As we approached the station I looked out of the carriage window.
+The silver river flowed in graceful curves between willows, until it
+vanished from the sight. But long after it was lost to view one could
+divine its course by the rows of poplars which lined its banks. A
+weathercock and two towers visible amid the trees marked the site of the
+town. Then I exclaimed, "Here is the resting place for me, here will I
+lay my head."
+
+[Illustration: 067]
+
+
+[Illustration: 068]
+
+
+
+
+25th July
+
+The walk I love best is the walk to Saint-Jean, for there, about
+a hundred yards from the town is a little wood, or rather a little
+half-wild cluster of hornbeams, maples, limes and lilac bushes, a
+bouquet that murmurs in the breeze. The very first day I discovered it,
+I felt its charm. I determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to
+know it tree by tree, to search out its humblest plants, its vetches,
+its saxifrages, and to see whether there was no Solomon's seal to be
+found growing beneath the shade of the big trees. I kept my word and
+now I am beginning to make acquaintance with the flora and fauna of my
+little wood. I had been reclining on the grass to-day for the space of
+an hour, book in hand, when I heard some one crying in a faint voice.
+I looked up and beheld a little girl standing beside an elderly man and
+weeping. The man was undeniably old. His face was long and pallid.
+There was an expression of sadness in his eyes and his mouth drooped
+mournfully. He had a skipping-rope in his hand and was looking fixedly
+at the child. Then he turned aside to brush away a tear from his cheek.
+It was then that I beheld him full face and saw that he was Marguerite's
+father. I was shocked at the great change that illness and sorrow had
+wrought in his haughty mien. Despair was graven on his countenance and
+he seemed to be calling for help.
+
+[Illustration: 070]
+
+I went up to him and, in response to my offer to assist him in any way
+possible, he explained with some embarrassment that a ball with which
+his little girl had been playing had got caught in a tree and that
+his stick, which he had thrown up in order to dislodge it, had become
+entangled in the branches. He was at his wit's end.
+
+Only a few years before, this same man had circumvented the policy of
+England and imparted a vigorous stimulus to French diplomacy in Europe.
+Then he fell with honour, and was followed in his retirement by a
+profound but honourable unpopularity. And now, behold his powers are
+unequal to the task of dislodging a ball from a tree. Such is the
+frailty of man. As for his daughter, Marie's daughter, a sort of
+presentiment forbade me to look in her face. And then when at length
+I did look at her, I could not tear myself away from such a sorrowful
+object of contemplation. She was no longer the little pink and white
+child I had seen in the Champs-Elysees; she had grown taller and
+thinner, and her face was wan as a waxen taper. Her languid eyes were
+encircled with blue rings. And her temples . . . what invisible hand had
+laid those two sad violets upon her temples?
+
+"There! there! there!" cried the old man as he stretched forth a
+trembling arm which pointed aimlessly in all directions.
+
+The first thing to be done was to help him. By means of a stone which I
+threw up into the tree, I soon managed to bring the ball down. X . . .
+witnessed its fall with childish delight. He had not recognized me. I
+hurriedly escaped to spare him the trouble of thanking me and myself the
+agony of seeing the change that had taken place in Marie's daughter.
+
+[Illustration: 074]
+
+
+[Illustration: 076]
+
+
+
+
+10th August
+
+I seldom go out. I am no longer moved by the beauty of things. Or to
+speak more truly, the more pleasurable and splendid aspects of nature
+give me pain. All day long I sully sheet after sheet of paper and
+beguile the tedious hours with the half-faded recollections of my
+childhood. What I am writing will be burned. I should be ashamed that
+pages, tear-stained and dream-haunted, should fall beneath the eyes
+of grave, sober-minded folk. What would they see in them? Naught but
+childish faces.
+
+[Illustration: 078]
+
+
+
+
+20th August
+
+To-dau I went for a stroll by the river in whose blue waters are
+mirrored the willows and the houses that befringe its banks. There is a
+seductive charm about running waters. They bear along with them as they
+flow all those idlers who love to dream their time away.
+
+The river lured me as far as the chateau de- ------ which had witnessed
+the betrothal and the death of Marie, and the birth of Marguerite. My
+heart tolled a knell within me when I saw once more that peaceful abode,
+which, despite the scenes of sorrow enacted within its walls, speaks,
+with its white pillared facade, of naught save elegant opulence and
+luxurious repose. I was so overcome that, to save myself from falling,
+I clung to the bars of the park gate and gazed at the wide lawns which
+stretched away as far as the flight of steps which the hem of Marie's
+robe had kissed so often. I had been there some minutes when the gate
+was opened and X ... came out.
+
+On this occasion, also, he was accompanied by his child: but this time
+she was not walking. She was lying in a perambulator which was being
+pushed by a governess. With her head resting on an embroidered pillow in
+the shadow of the lowered hood, she resembled one of those little waxen
+images of saint or martyr, embellished with silver filigree, on whose
+wounds and gems the nuns of Spain are wont to pore in the solitude of
+their cells.
+
+[Illustration: 080]
+
+Her father, elegantly dressed, presented a faded, tear-stained
+countenance. He advanced towards me with little faltering steps, took me
+by the hand and led me to his little girl.
+
+"Tell me," he said in the tone of a child asking a favour, "you don't
+think she has changed since you last saw her, do you? It was the day she
+threw her ball up into the tree."
+
+The perambulator which we were following in silence came to a halt in
+the Bois Saint-Jean. The governess lowered the hood. Marguerite lay with
+her head thrown back, her eyes big with terror, and she was stretching
+out her arms to push aside something that we could not see. Oh, I
+guessed well enough what invisible hand it was. The same hand that had
+touched the mother was now laid upon the child. I fell on my knees.
+But the phantom departed and Marguerite, raising her head, lay resting
+peacefully. I gathered some flowers and laid them reverently beside her.
+She smiled. Seeing her come back to life I gave her more flowers and
+sang to her, endeavouring to beguile her. The air and the feeling of
+happiness she now experienced brought back to her that desire to live
+which had forsaken her. At the end of an hour her cheeks were almost
+rosy. When it grew cool and we had to take the little suffering child
+back to the chateau again, her father took my hand as we parted and,
+pressing it, said in suppliant tones:
+
+"Come again to-morrow."
+
+[Illustration: 084]
+
+
+[Illustration: 086]
+
+
+
+
+21 st August
+
+I returned next day. On the steps of the Empire chateau I encountered
+the family doctor. He is a spare, elderly man whom you meet wherever
+there is good music to be heard. He seems like a man perpetually
+listening to the harmonies of some inward concert. He is for ever under
+the spell of sounds and lives by his ear alone. He is specially noted
+for his treatment of nervous complaints. Some say he is a genius;
+others that he is mad. Certainly there is something peculiar about him.
+When I saw him he was coming down the steps; his feet, his finger and
+his lips moving in time to some intricate measure.
+
+"Well, doctor," I said with an involuntary quaver in my voice, "and how
+is your little patient?"
+
+"She means to live," he answered.
+
+"You will pull her through for us, won't you?" I said eagerly.
+
+"I tell you she means to live."
+
+"And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really
+want to and that we do not die save with our own consent?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the
+gate, his head bowed as if in thought.
+
+"Certainly," he said again, "but they must really want to and not merely
+think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none
+save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say
+they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in
+which all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is
+unconscious, it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and
+when it fails we cease to be. The world _wills_, otherwise it would not
+exist."
+
+We walked on a few steps farther.
+
+"Look here," he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak
+tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads,
+"if that fellow there had not _willed_ to grow, I should like to know
+what power could have made him do so."
+
+But I had ceased to listen.
+
+"So you have hopes," I said at length, "that Marguerite . . ."
+
+But he was a stubborn little old fellow.
+
+He murmured as he walked away: "The Will's crowning Victory is Love."
+
+And I stood and watched him as he departed with little quick steps,
+beating time to a tune that was running in his head.
+
+I went quickly back to the chateau and found little Marguerite. The
+moment I saw her, I realized that she had the will to live. She was
+still very pale and very thin, but her eyes had more colour in them and
+were not so big, and her lips, lately so dead-looking and so silent,
+were gay with prattling talk.
+
+"You are late," she said. "Come here, see! I have a theatre and actors.
+Play me a beautiful piece. They say that 'Hop o' my Thumb' is nice. Play
+'Hop o' my Thumb' for me."
+
+[Illustration: 090]
+
+You may be sure I did not refuse. However, I encountered great
+difficulties at the very outset of my undertaking. I pointed out to
+Marguerite that the only actors she had were princes and princesses,
+and that we wanted woodmen, cooks and a certain number of folks of all
+sorts.
+
+She thought for a moment and then said:
+
+"A prince dressed like a cook; that one there looks like a cook, don't
+you think?"
+
+"Yes, I think so too."
+
+"Well, then, we'll make woodmen and cooks out of all the princes we have
+over."
+
+And that's what we did. O Wisdom, what a day we spent together!
+
+Many others like it followed in its train. I watched Marguerite taking
+an ever firmer hold on life. Now she is quite well again. I had a share
+in this miracle. I discovered a tiny portion of that gift wherein the
+apostles so richly abounded when they healed the sick by the laying on
+of hands.
+
+
+_Editor's Note_.--I found this manuscript in a train on the Northern
+Railway. I give it to the public without alteration of any sort, save
+that, as the names were those of well-known persons, I have thought it
+well to suppress them.
+
+Anatole France.
+
+[Illustration: 093]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #25406 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25406)
diff --git a/old/25406-h.htm.2021-01-25 b/old/25406-h.htm.2021-01-25
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
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+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Marguerite, by Anatole France
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marguerite, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Marguerite
+       1921
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Illustrator: Simeon
+
+Translator: J. Lewis May
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2008 [EBook #25406]
+Last Updated: October 5, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARGUERITE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/margTP.jpg" alt="Titlepage 010 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      MARGUERITE
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Anatole France
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Translated From The French By J. Lewis May <br /> <br /> With Twenty-Nine
+      Original Woodcuts By Simeon
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      London, John Lane Company, MCMXXI
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> PREFATORY LETTER </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <big><b>MARGUERITE</b></big> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> 5th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> 10th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> 1st November </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> 5th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> 10th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> 25th July </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> 10th August </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> 20th August </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> 21st August </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFATORY LETTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Publish Marguerite, dear Monsieur André Coq, if you so desire, but pray
+      relieve me from all responsibility in the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would argue too much literary conceit on my part were I anxious to
+      restore it to the light of day. It would argue, perhaps, still more did I
+      endeavour to keep it in obscurity. You will not succeed in wresting it for
+      long from the eternal oblivion where-unto it is destined. Ay me, how old
+      it is! I had lost all recollection of it. I have just read it over,
+      without fear or favour, as I should a work unknown to me, and it does not
+      seem to me that I have lighted upon a masterpiece. It would ill beseem me
+      to say more about it than that. My only pleasure as I read it was derived
+      from the proof it afforded that, even in those far-off days, when I was
+      writing this little trifle, I was no great lover of the Third Republic
+      with its pinchbeck virtues, its militarist imperialism, its ideas of
+      conquest, its love of money, its contempt for the handicrafts, its
+      unswerving predilection for the unlovely. Its leaders caused me terrible
+      misgivings. And the event has surpassed my apprehensions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not in my calculations to make myself a laughing-stock, by
+      taking Marguerite as a text for generalizations on French politics of the
+      late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The specimens of type and the woodcuts you have shown me promise a very
+      comely little book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Believe me, dear Monsieur Coq,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours sincerely,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anatole France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      La Béchellerie, 16th April, 1920.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MARGUERITE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/018.jpg" alt="018 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      5th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five o&rsquo;clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
+      my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
+      gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper an
+      invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the direction of
+      the Champs-Elysées, victorias and landaus kept rolling by. In the shadow
+      of the lowered carriage-hoods, women&rsquo;s faces gleamed clear and radiant and
+      I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by like hopes
+      vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman as she passed
+      by left me with an impression of light and perfume. I think a man, if he
+      is wise, will not ask much more than that of a beautiful woman. A gleam
+      and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even less behind it. Moreover,
+      that day, if Fortune herself had run with her wheel a-spinning before my
+      very nose along the pavement of the Pont de la Concorde, I should not have
+      so much as stretched forth an arm to pluck her by her golden hair. I
+      lacked nothing that day; all was mine. It was five o&rsquo;clock and I was free
+      till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free to saunter at will, to breathe at my
+      ease for two hours, to look on at things and not have to talk, to let my
+      thoughts wander as I listed. All was mine, I say again. My happiness was
+      making me a selfish man. I gazed at everything about me as though it were
+      all a picture, a splendid moving pageant, arranged for my own particular
+      delectation. It seemed to me as though the sun were shining for me alone,
+      as though it were pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my
+      special gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
+      swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
+      destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the people
+      about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an illusion,
+      that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has when he has
+      nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that score with a
+      poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten years on end with
+      politics and law making and is wearing away his life with those trivial
+      preoccupations men call affairs of state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
+      colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
+      ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
+      from the printer&rsquo;s and all smelling of printer&rsquo;s ink, conversations in
+      green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
+      speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one things,
+      the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the grey and
+      gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the purple
+      hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night; tasks which leave
+      you no soul to call your own and rob you of the consciousness of your own
+      identity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, it is so. I have left my own <i>ego</i> behind me there. It is
+      scattered up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports.
+      Industrious junior clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of
+      their beautiful green filing cases. And so I have had to go on living
+      without my <i>ego</i>, which, moreover, is how all politicians have to
+      live. But an <i>ego</i> is a strangely subtle thing. And wonder of
+      wonders! mine came back to me just now on the Pont de la Concorde. &lsquo;Twas
+      he without a doubt and, would you believe it, he had not suffered so very
+      much from his sojourn among those musty papers. The very moment he arrived
+      I found myself again, I recognized my own existence, whereof I had not
+      been conscious these ten years. &ldquo;Ha ha!&rdquo; said I to myself, &ldquo;since I exist,
+      I am just as well pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now
+      to improve this new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover&rsquo;s thoughts in
+      my heart, down the Champs-Elysées.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured steeds of
+      Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds themselves;
+      this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance is marked by
+      their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The carriages flow past
+      endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of lava or molten asphalt,
+      whereon the hats of the women seem borne along like so many flowers, and
+      like everything else one sees in Paris, at once extravagant and pretty. I
+      light up a cigar and looking at nothing, behold everything. So intense is
+      my joy that it scares me. It is the first cigar I have smoked for ten
+      years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun as many as ten a day in my room; but
+      those I scorched, bit, chewed and threw away; I never smoked them. This
+      one I am really and truly smoking and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of
+      poesy spreading grace and charm about it. What an interest I take in all I
+      see. These little shops, which display at regular intervals their motley
+      assortment of wares, fill me with delight. Here especially is one which I
+      cannot forbear stopping to look at. What I chiefly delight to contemplate
+      there is a decanter with lemonade in it. The decanter reflects in
+      miniature on its polished sides the trees around it and the women that
+      pass by and the skies. It has a lemon on the top of it which gives it a
+      sort of oriental air. However, it is not its shape nor its colour that is
+      the attraction in my eyes; I cannot keep my gaze from it because it
+      reminds me of my childhood. At the sight of it, innumerable delightful
+      scenes come thronging into my memory. Once again do I behold those shining
+      hours, those hours divine of early childhood. Ah, what would I not give to
+      be again the little boy of those days and to drink once more a glass of
+      that precious liquid!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/024.jpg" alt="024 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      In that little shop, I find once more, besides the lemonade and the
+      gooseberry syrup, all those divers things wherein my childhood took
+      delight. Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches, belts,
+      scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five to nine
+      years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of a Napoleon. I
+      played that mighty rôle, in my tenpenny soldier&rsquo;s kit, I played it from
+      start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of exile. For, mark
+      you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured prints from Épinal.
+      It was on them that I began to spell out those signs which to the learned
+      reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle. Yes, the sorriest little
+      coloured daub that ever came out of a village in the Vosges consists of
+      print and pictures, and what is the sum and substance of Science after all
+      but just pictures and print?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From those Épinal prints I learned things far finer and more useful than
+      anything I ever got from the little grammar and history books my
+      schoolmasters gave me to pore over. Épinal prints, you see, are stories,
+      and stories are mirrors of destiny. Blessed is the child that is brought
+      up on fairy-tales. His riper years should prove rich in wisdom and
+      imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story <i>The Blue Bird</i>.
+      I know him by his outspread tail. &lsquo;Tis he right enough. It is as much as I
+      can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman&rsquo;s neck
+      and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt I owe
+      him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to him.
+      Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of the Blue
+      Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and parliamentary
+      documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect then that the human
+      soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable metamorphoses and hallowed
+      sorrows, and if, under the spell of such thoughts, I gave to the clause I
+      chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a humaner sense, an added respect
+      for the soul and its rights, and for the universal order of things, that
+      clause would never fail to encounter vigorous opposition in the Chamber.
+      The counsels of the Blue Bird seldom prevailed in the committee stage.
+      Howbeit some did manage to get through Parliament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I now perceive that I am not the only one inspecting the little stall: a
+      little girl has come to a halt in front of the brilliant display. I am
+      looking at her from behind. Her long, bright hair comes tumbling in
+      cascades from under her red velvet hood and spreads out on her broad lace
+      collar and on her dress, which is the same colour as her hood. Impossible
+      to say what is the colour of her hair (there is no colour so beautiful)
+      but one can describe the lights in it; they are bright and pure and
+      changing, fair as the sun&rsquo;s rays, pale as a beam of starlight. Nay, more
+      than that, they shine, yes; but they flow also. They possess the splendour
+      of light, and the charm of pleasant waters. Methinks that, were I a poet,
+      I should write as many sonnets on those tresses as M. José Maria de
+      Heredia composed concerning the Conquerors of Castille d&rsquo;Or. They would
+      not be so fine, but they would be sweeter. The child, so far as I can
+      judge, is between four and five years old. All I can see of her face is
+      the tip of her ear, daintier than the daintiest jewel, and the innocent
+      curve of her cheek. She does not stir; she is holding her hoop in her left
+      hand; her right is at her lips as though she were biting her nails in her
+      eager contemplation. What is it she is gazing at so longingly? The shop
+      contains other things besides the arms and the gear of fighting men. Balls
+      and skipping ropes are suspended from the awning. On the stall are baby
+      dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard, smiling after the manner of
+      idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little six-penny dolls, dressed like
+      servant girls, stretch out their arms, little stumpy arms so flimsy that
+      the least breath of air sets them a-tremble. But the little maid whose
+      hair is made of liquid light, has no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her
+      whole soul hangs upon the lips of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be
+      calling her his mummy. He is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth
+      all by himself. He dominates, he effaces everything else. Once you have
+      beheld him, you see naught else save him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bolt upright in his warm wraps, a little swansdown tucker under his chin,
+      he is stretching out his little chubby arms for some one to take him. He
+      speaks straight to the little maid&rsquo;s heart. He appeals to her by every
+      maternal instinct she possesses. He is enchanting. His face has three
+      little dots, two black ones for the eyes, and one red one for the mouth.
+      But his eyes speak, his mouth invites you. He is alive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Philosophers are a heedless race. They pass by dolls with never a thought.
+      Nevertheless the doll is more than the statue, more than the idol. It
+      finds its way to the heart of woman, long ere she be a woman. It gives her
+      the first thrill of maternity. The doll is a thing august. Wherefore
+      cannot one of our great sculptors be so very kind as to take the trouble
+      to model dolls whose lineaments, coming to life beneath his fingers, would
+      tell of wisdom and of beauty?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the little girl awakens from her silent day-dream. She turns round
+      and shows her violet eyes made bigger still with wonder, her nose which
+      makes you smile to look at it, her tiny nose, quite white, that reminds
+      you of a little pug dog&rsquo;s black one, her solemn mouth, her shapely but too
+      delicate chin, her cheeks a shade too pale. I recognize her. Oh yes! I
+      recognize her with that instinctive certainty that is stronger than all
+      convictions supported by all the proofs imaginable. Oh yes, &lsquo;tis she, &lsquo;tis
+      indeed she and all that remains of the most charming of women. I try to
+      hasten away but I cannot leave her. That hair of living gold, it is her
+      mother&rsquo;s hair; those violet eyes, they are her mother&rsquo;s own; Oh, child of
+      my dreams, child of my despair! I long to gather you to my arms, to steal
+      you, to bear you away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a governess draws near, calls the child and leads her away: &ldquo;Come,
+      Marguerite, come along, it&rsquo;s time to go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Marguerite, casting a look of sad farewell at the baby with its
+      outstretched arms, reluctantly follows in the footsteps of a tall woman
+      clad in black with ostrich feathers in her hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/033.jpg" alt="Endpiece 033 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/034.jpg" alt="034 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      10th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jean, bring me file 117.... Now then, M. Boscheron, let&rsquo;s get this
+      circular done. Take this down: <i>I draw your special attention, M. le
+      Préfet, to the following point. An end must be put at the earliest
+      possible moment to an abuse which, if suffered to continue, would tend to&mdash;tend
+      to&mdash;I draw your special attention to the following point, M. le
+      Préfet. An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse</i>. Take that
+      down, M. Boscheron.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But M. Boscheron, my secretary, respectfully remarks that I keep on
+      dictating the same sentence. Jean deferentially places a file on my table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s that, Jean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;File number 117. You asked me to fetch it, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked you for file number 117?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Jean gives me an anxious glance and retires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where were we, M. Boscheron?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An end must be put as soon as possible to an abuse . . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right... <i>an abuse which would tend to diminish popular respect
+      for government servants and to transform</i>... transform, what a wealth
+      of hidden things that word conceals. I cannot so much as pronounce it but
+      a world of ideas and sentiments come thronging pell-mell to invade the
+      secret recesses of my being.&rdquo; &ldquo;I beg pardon, monsieur?&rdquo; &ldquo;What did you say,
+      M. Boscheron?&rdquo; &ldquo;Please repeat, monsieur; I didn&rsquo;t quite follow you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, Monsieur Boscheron? Possibly I was not very clear. Well, well! we
+      will stop there if you like. Give me what I have dictated, I will finish
+      it myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/036.jpg" alt="036 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      M. Boscheron gives me his notes, gathers up his papers, bows and retires.
+      Left alone in my office, I fall to examining the wallpaper with a sort of
+      idiotic minuteness. It has the appearance of green felt with here and
+      there a yellow stain; I begin to draw little men on my paper; I make an
+      effort to write; for the fact is my Chief has asked for the circular three
+      times and has promised the government deputies that it shall go to the
+      prefects forthwith. I am bound to let him have it. I begin reading it
+      through: <i>to diminish popular respect for government servants and to
+      transform them</i>. I make a blot; then with my pen I adorn it with hair.
+      I transform it into a comet. I dream of Marguerite&rsquo;s tresses. The other
+      day, in the Champs-Elysées, little filaments of gold, little delicate
+      spirals stood out from the rest of her graceful tresses, with a singular
+      brightness. You can see their like in fifteenth century miniatures, also
+      in some of an earlier date. Dante says in his <i>Vita Nuova</i>: &ldquo;One day
+      when I was busy drawing angel&rsquo;s heads . . .&rdquo; And now here am I trying to
+      draw angels&rsquo; heads on a government circular. Come now, we must get on with
+      it: <i>government servants and to transform them&mdash;transform them</i>
+      . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single word after that? How is it
+      I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever since I rediscovered my <i>ego</i>
+      on the Pont de la Concorde that evening of the lovely sunset? Transform,
+      did I say? O God of mystery, nature, truth, if she whose name even now
+      after four years I dare not utter, if she died in giving life to
+      Marguerite, I should believe, I should know with the certainty of
+      instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed into the daughter and
+      that they are one and the same being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0007" id="linkimage-0007">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/040.jpg" alt="040 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/042.jpg" alt="042 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      1st November
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      All&rsquo;s well. I have lost my <i>ego</i> again. It has gone back into the
+      green filing cases. Number 117 contains a good part of it. I have finished
+      my circular. It is drawn up in good official style. We have a fine piece
+      of legislation to get off before the holidays. My Chief speaks every day
+      in the House. Every night I correct the proofs of his speeches. If the
+      Blue Bird comes to see me now and again in the small hall of the Palais
+      Bourbon, it is merely to advise me to tone down some rather too forcible
+      expression and he never addresses himself to my imagination. I don&rsquo;t know
+      whether I am living happily or unhappily since I don&rsquo;t know that I am
+      living at all. I do not even recognize my own clothes. I picked up the hat
+      of the Comte de Mérodac a little while ago and wore it for three days
+      without knowing it, yet it is a romantic sombrero-like sort of thing worn
+      nowadays by no one save this elderly nobleman. I cut an astounding figure
+      they told me, but I never noticed myself, and, if by chance I had, I
+      should not have heeded what I saw since it had nothing to do with
+      politics. I am no longer a person; I am a piece of the official machine.
+      To-night I have neither proofs to correct nor official reception to
+      attend. I have put on my slippers. There is always a tiny bit of my <i>ego</i>
+      hidden away in these slippers. I am in my room seated by the fire and I am
+      conscious of being there. By heaven I wonder whether I should know myself
+      in the glass. Let&rsquo;s have a look. Hum! not so very ... I didn&rsquo;t think I was
+      so grave and respectable looking. I quite see that I shall have to take
+      myself seriously. I have been a long time about it, but then it wasn&rsquo;t for
+      me to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am a man of weight and I account myself such. But, alas, I do not know
+      myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
+      tedious business. No, I haven&rsquo;t the smallest desire to hold converse with
+      the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the other
+      hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that little
+      fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against the
+      frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a nice
+      little chap. I feel like calling him and saying &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s go and have a game
+      together shall we?&rdquo; But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That little
+      boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead as if I
+      were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For what have we
+      in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me to-day? In what
+      do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
+      over again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/046.jpg" alt="046 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
+      time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
+      with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
+      adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
+      battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart like
+      a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to soothe
+      all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the child that
+      I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me; I feel that I
+      can love him without selfishness and weep for him without unmanliness. He
+      is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my innocent simplicities and
+      my boundless hopes. We all of us die in swaddling clothes. Little
+      Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding life, how many times has
+      she not died and what profound depths of irrevocable memories, what a
+      grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not already been delved within
+      her, though she is but five years old. I, a stranger, a passer-by, know
+      more of her life than she does and, in consequence, I am more truly she
+      than she herself. After that let him who will prate of the feeling of
+      identity and the consciousness of self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss of
+      terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
+      instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
+      slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they have
+      called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are only
+      bearable provided we do not think about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/049.jpg" alt="049 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/050.jpg" alt="050 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      5th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front of
+      a toyshop in the Champs-Elysées, the child of her who first awakened in me
+      the sense of beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was unknown
+      to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love. The first
+      time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert to which her
+      father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had heard the finest
+      orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her attired in stately
+      weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only served to accentuate her
+      radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in me feelings which bore, I
+      think, a close resemblance to religious exaltation. I was no longer very
+      young. The uncertainty of my worldly position, dependent as it then was
+      upon the vicissitudes of a political party, combined with my natural
+      timidity to deprive me of all hope of figuring as a successful suitor. I
+      often saw her at her father&rsquo;s and she treated me with an air of open
+      friendliness that did not encourage me to foster higher ambitions. It was
+      clear I did not impress her as the sort of man with whom she could fall in
+      love. As for me, the sight of her and the sound of her voice produced in
+      me such a state of delicious agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled
+      though it be with grief, still avails to make me in love with life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/052.jpg" alt="052 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her always;
+      I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain to wed her.
+      No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my heart. &ldquo;It was not
+      love then,&rdquo; some one will say. I know not what it was, but I know that it
+      filled my soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange to
+      the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
+      sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
+      They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
+      break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
+      remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life; then,
+      one day, she told me she was going to be married. My feelings, as I have
+      said, bear a strong resemblance to religious emotion. They are sad, but in
+      their sadness they still preserve their charm. Grief corrupts them not.
+      From suffering they derive a wholesome bitterness that lends them
+      strength. I listened to her with that gentle courage which comes with
+      renunciation. She was marrying a man senior to myself, a widower, almost
+      an old man, whose birth and fortune had marked him out for the public
+      career in which he had displayed a haughtiness of disposition and much
+      misplaced courage. Although I moved in a lower sphere, I came in contact
+      with him on several important occasions. I belonged to a political group
+      with views very similar to his own, but we had never been able to meet
+      without considerable friction and, although the newspapers treated us with
+      the same approval or, as was more often the case, with the same hostility,
+      we were not friends, far from it, and we avoided each other with sedulous
+      care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was present at the wedding. I saw, and I shall ever see Marie, wearing
+      her white dress and lace veil. She was a little pale and very lovely. I
+      was struck, without apparent reason, by the impression of fragility with
+      which this girl who was animated by so poetic a soul seemed to give one.
+      This impression, which I think occurred to no one but myself, was only too
+      well founded. I never saw Marie again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She died after three years of married life, leaving a little girl ten
+      months old. An indescribable feeling of tender affection has always drawn
+      me to this child, to Marie&rsquo;s Marguerite. An unconquerable desire to see
+      her took possession of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was being brought up at &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; near Melun, where her
+      father had a château standing in the midst of a magnificent park. One day
+      I went to &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and wandered for hours, like a thief,
+      about the park bound-aries. At last, through a gap in the trees, I caught
+      sight of Marguerite in the arms of her nurse, who was dressed in black.
+      She was wearing a hat with white plumes and an embroidered pelisse. I
+      cannot say in what respect she differed from any other child, but I
+      thought she was the fairest in the world. It was autumn. The wind that was
+      sighing in the trees was whirling the dead leaves about in little eddies
+      as they floated to earth. Dead leaves covered all the long avenue in which
+      the little white-robed child was being carried up and down. An immense
+      sadness took possession of me. At the edge of a bed of flowers as white as
+      the raiment of Marguerite, an old gardener who was gathering up the fallen
+      leaves saluted his little mistress with a smile and, with his hand on his
+      rake and hat in hand, spoke to her with the gentle gaiety of old men who
+      are not overburdened with their thoughts. But she paid no heed to him.
+      With her little hand like to a star she sought her nurse&rsquo;s breast. As I
+      hurried away with grief in my heart, the nurse resumed her walk and I
+      heard the sound of the dead leaves sighing sorrowfully beneath her steps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/058.jpg" alt="058 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/060.jpg" alt="060 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      10th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The President of the Chamber rises and says: &ldquo;The motion proposed by
+      Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; is now put.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prime Minister, without quitting his seat says: &ldquo;The Government does
+      not assent to the motion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The President rings his bell and says: &ldquo;A ballot has been demanded. A
+      ballot will therefore be taken. Those in favour of Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+      and &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&lsquo;s motion must place a white paper in the urn;
+      those who are against it, a blue paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a great movement in the hall. The deputies poured out in a
+      disorderly mob into the corridors, while the ushers passed the white metal
+      urn along the tiers of seats. The corridors were full of the sound of
+      shuffling feet, and of shouting and gesticulating people. Grave looking
+      young men and excited old ones went passing by. The air was pierced with
+      the sound of voices calling out figures:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eleven votes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, nine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are being checked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight against.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not at all; eight for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, the amendment is carried?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Government is beaten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The President&rsquo;s bell is heard in the corridors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly the hall fills again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The President standing up with a paper in his hand rings his bell for the
+      last time and says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The following is the result of the ballot on the motion proposed by
+      Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;. Number of votes
+      470; for the motion 239 ; against 231. The motion is carried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an immense sensation. The Ministers get up and leave their seats.
+      Two or three friends shake them timidly by the hand. It&rsquo;s all over, they
+      are beaten. They go under and I with them. I no longer count. I make up my
+      mind to it. To say that I am happy would be to go too far. But it spells
+      the end of my worries and bothers and toils. I have regained my freedom,
+      but not voluntarily. Repose and liberty, I&rsquo;ve got them back again, but it
+      is to my defeat that I owe them. An honourable defeat it is true, but
+      painful all the same because our ideas suffer with ourselves. How many
+      things are involved in our fall, alas. Economy, public security,
+      tranquillity of conscience and that spirit of prudence, that continuity of
+      policy, which gives a nation its strength. I hurried away to shake hands
+      with the Chief of my department, proud of having rendered faithful service
+      to so upright a leader. Then, pushing my way through the crowd that had
+      gathered about the precincts of the Palais Bourbon, I crossed the Seine
+      and made my way slowly towards the Madeleine. At the top of the boulevard
+      there was a barrow of flowers drawn up alongside the kerb. Between the two
+      shafts was a young girl making up bunches of violets. I went up to her and
+      asked her for a bunch. I then saw a little girl of four sitting on the
+      barrow amid the flowers. With her baby fingers she was trying to make
+      bunches like her mother. She raised her head at my approach and, with a
+      smile, held out all the flowers she had in her hands. When she had given
+      them all to me, she blew kisses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/064.jpg" alt="064 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      I was extremely flattered. &ldquo;I must have a kindly look about me,&rdquo; I said to
+      myself, &ldquo;for a child to smile a welcome at me like that. What is your
+      name?&rdquo; I asked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marguerite,&rdquo; replied her mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was half-past six. There was a news-vendor&rsquo;s hard by. I bought a paper.
+      As soon as I glanced at it I saw that I was in for a wigging. The
+      political editor, having referred to my Chief as an individual of ill
+      omen, spoke of me too, on the first page, as a sinister creature. But,
+      after Marguerite&rsquo;s kisses, I could not believe it. I felt at once a
+      lightness and a sort of emptiness at heart; both glad and sorrowful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A week later found me on my way, to &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; near Melun,
+      where I had taken a little house hard by the Château of Marguerite&rsquo;s
+      upbringing. In my eyes it was the fairest region in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we approached the station I looked out of the carriage window. The
+      silver river flowed in graceful curves between willows, until it vanished
+      from the sight. But long after it was lost to view one could divine its
+      course by the rows of poplars which lined its banks. A weathercock and two
+      towers visible amid the trees marked the site of the town. Then I
+      exclaimed, &ldquo;Here is the resting place for me, here will I lay my head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/067.jpg" alt="067 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/068.jpg" alt="068 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      25th July
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The walk I love best is the walk to Saint-Jean, for there, about a hundred
+      yards from the town is a little wood, or rather a little half-wild cluster
+      of hornbeams, maples, limes and lilac bushes, a bouquet that murmurs in
+      the breeze. The very first day I discovered it, I felt its charm. I
+      determined to make love to it; I made up my mind to know it tree by tree,
+      to search out its humblest plants, its vetches, its saxifrages, and to see
+      whether there was no Solomon&rsquo;s seal to be found growing beneath the shade
+      of the big trees. I kept my word and now I am beginning to make
+      acquaintance with the flora and fauna of my little wood. I had been
+      reclining on the grass to-day for the space of an hour, book in hand, when
+      I heard some one crying in a faint voice. I looked up and beheld a little
+      girl standing beside an elderly man and weeping. The man was undeniably
+      old. His face was long and pallid. There was an expression of sadness in
+      his eyes and his mouth drooped mournfully. He had a skipping-rope in his
+      hand and was looking fixedly at the child. Then he turned aside to brush
+      away a tear from his cheek. It was then that I beheld him full face and
+      saw that he was Marguerite&rsquo;s father. I was shocked at the great change
+      that illness and sorrow had wrought in his haughty mien. Despair was
+      graven on his countenance and he seemed to be calling for help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/070.jpg" alt="070 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      I went up to him and, in response to my offer to assist him in any way
+      possible, he explained with some embarrassment that a ball with which his
+      little girl had been playing had got caught in a tree and that his stick,
+      which he had thrown up in order to dislodge it, had become entangled in
+      the branches. He was at his wit&rsquo;s end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only a few years before, this same man had circumvented the policy of
+      England and imparted a vigorous stimulus to French diplomacy in Europe.
+      Then he fell with honour, and was followed in his retirement by a profound
+      but honourable unpopularity. And now, behold his powers are unequal to the
+      task of dislodging a ball from a tree. Such is the frailty of man. As for
+      his daughter, Marie&rsquo;s daughter, a sort of presentiment forbade me to look
+      in her face. And then when at length I did look at her, I could not tear
+      myself away from such a sorrowful object of contemplation. She was no
+      longer the little pink and white child I had seen in the Champs-Elysées;
+      she had grown taller and thinner, and her face was wan as a waxen taper.
+      Her languid eyes were encircled with blue rings. And her temples . . .
+      what invisible hand had laid those two sad violets upon her temples?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There! there! there!&rdquo; cried the old man as he stretched forth a trembling
+      arm which pointed aimlessly in all directions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first thing to be done was to help him. By means of a stone which I
+      threw up into the tree, I soon managed to bring the ball down. X . . .
+      witnessed its fall with childish delight. He had not recognized me. I
+      hurriedly escaped to spare him the trouble of thanking me and myself the
+      agony of seeing the change that had taken place in Marie&rsquo;s daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/074.jpg" alt="074 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/076.jpg" alt="076 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      10th August
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I seldom go out. I am no longer moved by the beauty of things. Or to speak
+      more truly, the more pleasurable and splendid aspects of nature give me
+      pain. All day long I sully sheet after sheet of paper and beguile the
+      tedious hours with the half-faded recollections of my childhood. What I am
+      writing will be burned. I should be ashamed that pages, tear-stained and
+      dream-haunted, should fall beneath the eyes of grave, sober-minded folk.
+      What would they see in them? Naught but childish faces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/078.jpg" alt="078 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      20th August
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To-dau I went for a stroll by the river in whose blue waters are mirrored
+      the willows and the houses that befringe its banks. There is a seductive
+      charm about running waters. They bear along with them as they flow all
+      those idlers who love to dream their time away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The river lured me as far as the château de- &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; which
+      had witnessed the betrothal and the death of Marie, and the birth of
+      Marguerite. My heart tolled a knell within me when I saw once more that
+      peaceful abode, which, despite the scenes of sorrow enacted within its
+      walls, speaks, with its white pillared façade, of naught save elegant
+      opulence and luxurious repose. I was so overcome that, to save myself from
+      falling, I clung to the bars of the park gate and gazed at the wide lawns
+      which stretched away as far as the flight of steps which the hem of
+      Marie&rsquo;s robe had kissed so often. I had been there some minutes when the
+      gate was opened and X ... came out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this occasion, also, he was accompanied by his child: but this time she
+      was not walking. She was lying in a perambulator which was being pushed by
+      a governess. With her head resting on an embroidered pillow in the shadow
+      of the lowered hood, she resembled one of those little waxen images of
+      saint or martyr, embellished with silver filigree, on whose wounds and
+      gems the nuns of Spain are wont to pore in the solitude of their cells.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/080.jpg" alt="080 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      Her father, elegantly dressed, presented a faded, tear-stained
+      countenance. He advanced towards me with little faltering steps, took me
+      by the hand and led me to his little girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; he said in the tone of a child asking a favour, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t
+      think she has changed since you last saw her, do you? It was the day she
+      threw her ball up into the tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The perambulator which we were following in silence came to a halt in the
+      Bois Saint-Jean. The governess lowered the hood. Marguerite lay with her
+      head thrown back, her eyes big with terror, and she was stretching out her
+      arms to push aside something that we could not see. Oh, I guessed well
+      enough what invisible hand it was. The same hand that had touched the
+      mother was now laid upon the child. I fell on my knees. But the phantom
+      departed and Marguerite, raising her head, lay resting peacefully. I
+      gathered some flowers and laid them reverently beside her. She smiled.
+      Seeing her come back to life I gave her more flowers and sang to her,
+      endeavouring to beguile her. The air and the feeling of happiness she now
+      experienced brought back to her that desire to live which had forsaken
+      her. At the end of an hour her cheeks were almost rosy. When it grew cool
+      and we had to take the little suffering child back to the château again,
+      her father took my hand as we parted and, pressing it, said in suppliant
+      tones:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come again to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/084.jpg" alt="084 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/086.jpg" alt="086 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      21st August
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I returned next day. On the steps of the Empire château I encountered the
+      family doctor. He is a spare, elderly man whom you meet wherever there is
+      good music to be heard. He seems like a man perpetually listening to the
+      harmonies of some inward concert. He is for ever under the spell of sounds
+      and lives by his ear alone. He is specially noted for his treatment of
+      nervous complaints. Some say he is a genius; others that he is mad.
+      Certainly there is something peculiar about him. When I saw him he was
+      coming down the steps; his feet, his finger and his lips moving in time to
+      some intricate measure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, doctor,&rdquo; I said with an involuntary quaver in my voice, &ldquo;and how is
+      your little patient?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She means to live,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will pull her through for us, won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; I said eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you she means to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really want
+      to and that we do not die save with our own consent?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the
+      gate, his head bowed as if in thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; he said again, &ldquo;but they must really want to and not merely
+      think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none
+      save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say
+      they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in which
+      all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is unconscious,
+      it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and when it fails we
+      cease to be. The world <i>wills</i>, otherwise it would not exist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked on a few steps farther.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak
+      tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads,
+      &ldquo;if that fellow there had not <i>willed</i> to grow, I should like to know
+      what power could have made him do so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I had ceased to listen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you have hopes,&rdquo; I said at length, &ldquo;that Marguerite . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was a stubborn little old fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He murmured as he walked away: &ldquo;The Will&rsquo;s crowning Victory is Love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And I stood and watched him as he departed with little quick steps,
+      beating time to a tune that was running in his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went quickly back to the château and found little Marguerite. The moment
+      I saw her, I realized that she had the will to live. She was still very
+      pale and very thin, but her eyes had more colour in them and were not so
+      big, and her lips, lately so dead-looking and so silent, were gay with
+      prattling talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are late,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Come here, see! I have a theatre and actors.
+      Play me a beautiful piece. They say that &lsquo;Hop o&rsquo; my Thumb&rsquo; is nice. Play
+      &lsquo;Hop o&rsquo; my Thumb&rsquo; for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/090.jpg" alt="090 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure I did not refuse. However, I encountered great
+      difficulties at the very outset of my undertaking. I pointed out to
+      Marguerite that the only actors she had were princes and princesses, and
+      that we wanted woodmen, cooks and a certain number of folks of all sorts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought for a moment and then said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A prince dressed like a cook; that one there looks like a cook, don&rsquo;t you
+      think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, we&rsquo;ll make woodmen and cooks out of all the princes we have
+      over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that&rsquo;s what we did. O Wisdom, what a day we spent together!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many others like it followed in its train. I watched Marguerite taking an
+      ever firmer hold on life. Now she is quite well again. I had a share in
+      this miracle. I discovered a tiny portion of that gift wherein the
+      apostles so richly abounded when they healed the sick by the laying on of
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Editor&rsquo;s Note</i>.&mdash;I found this manuscript in a train on the
+      Northern Railway. I give it to the public without alteration of any sort,
+      save that, as the names were those of well-known persons, I have thought
+      it well to suppress them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anatole France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026">
+      <!-- IMG --></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%">
+      <img src="images/093.jpg" alt="093 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>