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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of a Child, by Pierre Loti
+
+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: The Story of a Child
+
+Author: Pierre Loti
+
+Translator: Caroline F. Smith
+
+Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #6664]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF A CHILD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF A CHILD
+
+By Pierre Loti
+
+
+Translated by Caroline F. Smith
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+There is to-day a widely spread new interest in child life, a desire to
+get nearer to children and understand them. To be sure child study is
+not new; every wise parent and every sympathetic teacher has ever been
+a student of children; but there is now an effort to do more consciously
+and systematically what has always been done in some way.
+
+In the few years since this modern movement began much has been
+accomplished, yet there is among many thoughtful people a strong
+reaction from the hopes awakened by the enthusiastic heralding of the
+newer aspects of psychology. It had been supposed that our science would
+soon revolutionize education; indeed, taking the wish for the fact, we
+began to talk about the new and the old education (both mythical) and
+boast of our millennium. I would not underrate the real progress, the
+expansion of educational activities, the enormous gains made in many
+ways; but the millennium! The same old errors meet us in new forms, the
+old problems are yet unsolved, the waste is so vast that we sometimes
+feel thankful that we cannot do as much as we would, and that Nature
+protects children from our worst mistakes.
+
+What is the source of this disappointment? Is it not that education,
+like all other aspects of life, can never be reduced to mere science? We
+need science, it must be increasingly the basis of all life; but exact
+science develops very slowly, and meantime we must live. Doubtless the
+time will come when our study of mind will have advanced so far that we
+can lay down certain great principles as tested laws, and thus clarify
+many questions. Even then the solution of the problem will not be in the
+enunciation of the theoretic principle, but will lie in its application
+to practice; and that application must always depend upon instinct,
+tact, appreciation, as well as upon the scientific law. Even the aid
+that science can contribute is given slowly; meanwhile we must work with
+these children and lift them to the largest life.
+
+It is in relation to this practical work of education that our effort to
+study children gets its human value. There are always two points of
+view possible with reference to life. From the standpoint of nature
+and science, individuals count for little. Nature can waste a thousand
+acorns to raise one oak, hundreds of children may be sacrificed that
+a truth may be seen. But from the ethical and human point of view the
+meaning of all life is in each individual. That one child should be lost
+is a kind of ruin to the universe.
+
+It is this second point of view which every parent and every teacher
+must take; and the great practical value of our new study of children
+is that it brings us into personal relation with the child world, and so
+aids in that subtle touch of life upon life which is the very heart of
+education.
+
+It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have
+a high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly
+significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of
+childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal
+world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood,
+and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be
+associated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another
+child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the
+child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to
+read the lesson of the whole.
+
+It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the
+absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the
+mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as
+well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study.
+Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us
+into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because
+interpretative of the spirit.
+
+It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of
+their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of
+daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may
+look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.
+The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.
+How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her
+girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot
+see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories
+in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal
+discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great
+study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any
+one who will appreciatively respond to it.
+
+A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in
+developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape
+definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could
+scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child." There is hardly
+a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was done to
+him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of impressions through
+the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of
+personality most necessary to understand. All that Loti is and has been
+is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child. Exquisite sensitiveness
+to impressions whether of body or soul, the egotism of a nature much
+occupied with its own subjective feelings, a being atune in response to
+the haunting melody of the sunset, and the vague mystery of the seas,
+a subtle melancholy that comes from the predominance of feeling over
+masculine power of action, leading one to drift like Francesca with the
+winds of emotion, terrible or sweet, rather than to fix the tide of the
+universe in the centre of the forceful deed--all these qualities are in
+the dreams of the child as in the life of the man.
+
+And the style?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with
+its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of
+wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and
+ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of his
+music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child
+he describes.
+
+Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness. Such a
+type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it--the
+haunting hunger for the permanence of impressions that come and go,
+which pulsates through the book till we can scarcely keep back the
+tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries--Death and Life (and
+which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on--the fate of
+a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense
+emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of
+fancy and speculation with the swift sword-stroke of an heroic deed.
+
+It is fortunate that the translator has caught the subtle charm of
+Loti's style, so difficult to render in another speech, in an amazing
+degree. This is peculiarly necessary here, for accuracy of translation
+means giving the delicate changes of color and elusive chords of music
+that voice the moods and impressions of which the book is made.
+
+Let us read the revelation of this book not primarily to condemn or
+praise, or even to estimate and define, but to appreciate. If it be true
+that no one ever looked into the Kingdom of Heaven except through the
+eyes of a little child, if it be true that the eyes of every unspoiled
+child are such a window, take the vision and be thankful. If, perchance,
+this window should open toward strange abysses that reach vaguely away,
+or upon dark meadows that lie ghost-like in the mingled light, if out
+of the abyss rises, undefined, the vast, dim shape of the mystery, and
+wakens in us the haunting memories of dead yesterdays and forgotten
+years, if we seem carried past the day into the gray vastness that is
+beyond the sunset and before the dawn, let us recognize that the mystery
+or mysteries, the annunciation of the Infinite is a little child.
+
+EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS.
+
+
+
+TO HER MAJESTY ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ROUMANIA.
+
+December, 188-
+
+I am almost too old to undertake this book, for a sort of night is
+falling about me; where shall I find the words vital and young enough
+for the task?
+
+To-morrow, at sea, I will commence it; at least I will endeavor to put
+into it all that was best of myself at a time when as yet there was
+nothing very bad.
+
+So that romantic love may find no place in it, except in the illusory
+form of a vision, I will end it at an early age.
+
+And to the sovereign lady whose suggestion it was that I write it, I
+offer it as a humble token of my respect and admiration.
+
+PIERRE LOTI.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF A CHILD.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+
+It is with some degree of awe that I touch upon the enigma of my
+impressions at the commencement of my life. I am almost doubtful whether
+they had reality within my own experience, or whether they are not,
+rather, recollections mysteriously transmitted--I feel an almost sacred
+hesitation when I would fathom their depths.
+
+I came forth from the darkness of unconsciousness very gradually, for my
+mind was illumined only fitfully, but then by outbursts of splendor
+that compelled and fascinated my infant gaze. When the light was
+extinguished, I lapsed once more into the non-consciousness of the
+new-born animal, of the tiny plant just germinating.
+
+The history of my earliest years is that of a child much indulged
+and petted to whom nothing of moment happened; and into whose narrow,
+protected life no jarring came that was not foreseen, and the shock of
+which was not deadened with solicitous care. In my manners I was always
+very tractable and submissive. That I may not make my recital tedious,
+I will note without continuity and without the proper transitions those
+moments which are impressed upon my mind because of their strangeness,
+those moments that are still so vividly remembered, although I have
+forgotten many poignant sorrows, many lands, adventures, and places.
+
+I was at that time like a fledgling swallow living high up in a niche in
+the eaves, who from time to time peeps out over the top of its nest with
+its little bright eyes. With the eyes of imagination it sees into the
+deeps of space, although to the actual vision only a courtyard and
+street are visible; and it sees into depths which it will presently need
+to journey through. It was during such moments of clairvoyance that I
+had a vision of the infinity of which before my present life I was a
+part. Then, in spite of myself, my consciousness flagged, and for days
+together I lived the tranquil, subconscious life of early childhood.
+
+At first my mind, altogether unimpressed and undeveloped, may be
+compared to a photographer's apparatus fitted with its sensitized glass.
+Objects insufficiently lighted up make no impression upon the virgin
+plates; but when a vivid splendor falls upon them, and when they
+are encircled by disks of light, these once dim objects now engrave
+themselves upon the glass. My first recollections are of bright summer
+days and sparkling noon times,--or more truly, are recollections of the
+light of wood fires burning with great ruddy flames.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+
+As if it were yesterday I recall the evening when I suddenly discovered
+that I could run and jump; and I remember that I was intoxicated by the
+delicious sensation almost to the point of falling.
+
+This must have been at about the commencement of my second winter. At
+the sad hour of twilight I was in the dining-room of my parents' house,
+which room had always seemed a very vast one to me. At first, I was
+quiet, made so, no doubt, by the influence of the environing darkness,
+for the lamp was not yet lighted. But as the hour for dinner approached,
+a maid-servant came in and threw an armful of small wood into the
+fireplace to reanimate the dying fire. Immediately there was a beautiful
+bright light, and the leaping flames illuminated everything, and waves
+of light spread to the far part of the room where I sat. The flames
+danced and leaped with a twining motion ever higher and higher and
+more gayly, and the tremulous shadows along the wall ran to their
+hiding-places--oh! how quickly I arose overwhelmed with admiration for
+I recollect that I had been sitting at the feet of my great-aunt Bertha
+(at that time already very old) who half dozed in her chair. We were
+near a window through which the gray night filtered; I was seated
+upon one of those high, old-fashioned foot-stools with two steps, so
+convenient for little children who can from that vantage ground put
+their heads in grandmother's or grand-aunt's lap, and wheedle so
+effectually.
+
+I arose in ecstasy, and approached the flames; then in the circle of
+light which lay upon the carpet I began to walk around and around and to
+turn. Ever faster and faster I went, until suddenly I felt an unwonted
+elasticity run through my limbs, and in a twinkling I invented a new and
+amusing style of motion; it was to push my feet very hard against the
+floor, and then to lift them up together suddenly for a half second.
+When I fell, up I sprang and recommenced my play. Bang! Bang! With every
+increasing noise I went against the floor, and at last I began to feel a
+singular but agreeable giddiness in my head. I knew how to jump! I knew
+how to run!
+
+I am convinced that that is my earliest distinct recollection of great
+joyousness.
+
+"Dear me! What is the matter with the child this evening?" asked my
+great-aunt Bertha, with some anxiety. And I hear again the unexpected
+sound of her voice.
+
+But I still kept on jumping. Like those tiny foolish moths which of an
+evening revolve about the light of a lamp, I went around in the luminous
+circle which widened and retracted, ever taking form from the wavering
+light of the flames. And I remember all of this so vividly that my eyes
+can still see the smallest details of the texture of the carpet which
+was the scene of the event. It was of durable stuff called home-spun,
+woven in the country by native weavers. (Our house was still furnished
+as it had been in my maternal grandmother's time, as she had arranged
+it after she had quitted the Island, and come to the mainland.--A
+little later I will speak of this Island which had already a mysterious
+attraction for my youthful imagination.--It was a simple country house,
+notable for its Huguenot austerity; and it was a home where immaculate
+cleanliness and extreme order were the sole luxuries.)
+
+In the circle of light, which grew ever more and more narrow, I still
+jumped; but as I did so I had thoughts that were of an intensity not
+habitual with me. At the same time that my tiny limbs discovered their
+power, my spirit also knew itself; a burst of light overspread my mind
+where dawning ideas still showed forth feebly. And it is without doubt
+to the inner awakening that this fleeting moment of my life owes its
+existence, owes undoubtedly its permanency in memory. But vainly I seek
+for the words, that seem ever to escape me, through which to express my
+elusive emotions. . . . Here in the dining-room I look about and see the
+chairs standing the length of the wall, and I am reminded of the aged
+grandmother, grand-aunts and aunts who always come at a certain hour
+and seat themselves in them. Why are they not here now? At this moment I
+would like to feel their protecting presence about me. Probably they are
+upstairs in their rooms on the second floor; between them and me there
+is the dim stairway, the stairway that I people with shadowy beings the
+thought of which makes me tremble. . . . And my mother? I would wish
+most especially for her, but I know that she has gone out, gone out into
+the long streets which in my imagination have no end. I had myself gone
+to the door with her and had asked her: "When returnest thou?" And she
+had promised me that she would return speedily. Later they told me that
+when I was a child I would never permit any members of the family to
+leave the house to go walking or visiting without first obtaining their
+assurance of a speedy homecoming. "You will come back soon?" I would
+say, and I always asked the question anxiously, as I followed them to
+the door.
+
+My mother had departed, and it gave my heart a feeling of heaviness to
+know that she was out. Out in the streets! I was content not to be there
+where it was cold and dark, where little children so easily lost their
+way,--how snug it was to be within doors before the fire that warmed me
+through and through; how nice it was to be at home! I had never realized
+it until this evening--doubtless it was my first distinct feeling of
+attachment to hearth and home, and I was sadly troubled at the thought
+of the immense, strange world lying beyond the door. It was then that
+I had, for the first time, a conscious affection for my aged aunts and
+grand-aunts, who cared for me in infancy, whom I longed to have seated
+around me at this dim, sad, twilight hour.
+
+In the meantime the once bright and playful flames had died down, the
+armful of wood was consumed, and as the lamp was not lighted, the room
+was quite dark. I had already stumbled upon the home-spun carpet, but as
+I had not hurt myself, I recommenced my amusing play. For an instant I
+thought to experience a new but strange joy by going into the shadowy
+and distant recesses of the room; but I was overtaken there by an
+indefinable terror of something which I cannot name, and I hastily took
+refuge in the dim circle of light and looked behind me with a shudder
+to see whether anything had followed me from out of those dark corners.
+Finally the flames died away entirely, and I was really afraid; aunt
+Bertha sat motionless upon her chair, and although I felt that her eyes
+were upon me I was not reassured. The very chairs, the chairs ranged
+about the room, began to disquiet me because their long shadows, that
+stretched behind them exaggerating the height of ceiling and length
+of wall, moved restlessly like souls in the agonies of death. And
+especially there was a half-open door that led into a very dark hall,
+which in its turn opened into a large empty parlor absolutely dark. Oh!
+with what intensity I fixed my eyes upon that door to which I would not
+for the world have turned my back!
+
+This was the beginning of those daily winter-evening terrors which in
+that beloved home cast such a gloom over my childhood.
+
+What I feared to see enter that door had no well defined form, but
+the fear was none the less definite to me: and it kept me standing
+motionless near the dead fire with wide open eyes and fluttering heart.
+When my mother suddenly entered the room by a different door, oh! how
+I clung to her and covered my face with her dress: it was a supreme
+protection, the sanctuary where no harm could reach me, the harbor of
+harbors where the storm is forgotten. . . .
+
+At this instant the thread of recollection breaks, I can follow it no
+farther.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+
+After the ineffaceable impression left by that first fright and that
+first dance before the winter fire many months passed during which
+no other events were engraven upon my memory, and I relapsed into a
+twilight state similar to that at the commencement of my life. But the
+mental dimness was pierced now and again with a bright light; as the
+gray of early morning is tinged by the rose-color of dawning.
+
+I believe that the impressions which succeeded were those of the summer
+time, of the great sun and nature. I recall feeling an almost delicious
+terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June
+grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self
+consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me
+to explain it.
+
+We were visiting at a country place called Limoise, a place that at
+later time played a great part in my life. It belonged to neighbors
+and friends, the D----s, whose house in town was directly next to ours.
+Perhaps I had visited Limoise the preceding summer, but at that time I
+was very like a cocoon before it has crawled from its silken wrapping.
+The day that I now refer to is the one in which I was able to reflect
+for the first time, in which I first knew the sweetness of reverie.
+
+I have forgotten our departure, the carriage ride and our arrival. But I
+remember distinctly that late one hot afternoon, as the sun was setting,
+I found myself alone in a remote part of a deserted garden. The gray
+walls overgrown with ivy and mosses separated its grove of trees from
+the moorland and the rocky country round about it. For me, brought up in
+the city, the old and solitary garden, where even the fruit trees were
+dying from old age, had all the mystery and charm of a primeval
+forest. I crossed a border of box, and I was in the midst of a large
+uncultivated tract filled with climbing asparagus and great weeds. Then
+I cowered down, as is the fashion of little children, that I might
+be more effectually hidden by what hid me sufficiently already, and I
+remained there motionless with eyes dilated and with quickening spirit,
+half afraid, half enraptured. The feeling that I experienced in the
+presence of these unfamiliar things was one of reflection rather than of
+astonishment. I knew that the bright green vegetation closing in about
+me was every where in no less measure than in the heart of this
+forest, and emotions, sad and weird and vague took possession of me
+and affrighted but fascinated me. That I might remain hidden as long as
+possible I crouched lower and still lower, and I felt the joy a little
+Indian boy feels when he is in his beloved forest.
+
+Suddenly I heard someone call: "Pierre! Pierre! Dear Pierre!" I did not
+reply, but instead lay as close as possible to the ground, and sought to
+hide under the weeds and the waving branches of the asparagus.
+
+Still I heard: "Pierre, Pierre." It was Lucette; I knew her voice, and
+from the mockery of her tone I felt sure that she had spied me. But I
+could not see her although I looked about me very carefully: no one was
+visible!
+
+With peals of laughter she continued to call, and her voice grew merrier
+and merrier. Where can she be? thought I.
+
+Ah! At last I spied her perched upon the twisted branch of a tree that
+was overhung with gray moss!
+
+I was fairly caught and I came out of my green hiding place.
+
+As I rose I gazed over the wild and flowering things, and saw the corner
+of the old moss-grown wall that enclosed the garden. That wall was
+destined to be at a later time a very familiar haunt of mine, for on
+the Thursday holidays during my college life I spent many a happy hour
+sitting upon it contemplating the peaceful and quiet country, and there
+I mused, to the chirping accompaniment of the crickets, of those distant
+countries fairer and sunnier than my own. And upon that summer day those
+gray and crumbling stones, defaced by the sun and weather, and overgrown
+with mosses, gave me for the first time an indefinable impression of the
+persistence of things; a vague conception of existences antedating my
+own, in times long past.
+
+Lucette D----, my elder by eight or ten years, seemed to me already a
+grown person. I cannot recall the time when I did not know her. Later I
+came to love her as a sister, and her early death in her prime was one
+of the first real griefs of my boyhood.
+
+And the first recollection I have of her is as I saw her in the branches
+of the old pear tree. Her image doubtless begets a vividness from the
+two new emotions with which it is blended: the enchanting uneasiness
+I felt at the invasion of green nature and the melancholy reverie that
+took possession of me as I contemplated the old wall, type of ancient
+things and olden times.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+
+I will now endeavor to explain the impression that the sea made upon
+me at our first brief and melancholy encounter, which took place at
+twilight upon the evening of my arrival at the Island.
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that I could scarcely see it, it had so
+remarkable an effect on me that in a single moment it was engraven upon
+my memory forever. I feel a retrospective shudder run through me when my
+spirit broods upon the recollection.
+
+We had but newly arrived at this village near St. Ongeoise where my
+parents had rented a fisherman's house for the bathing season. I knew
+that we had come here for something called the sea, but I had had
+no glimpse of it (a line of dunes hid it from me because of my short
+stature), and I was extremely impatient to become acquainted with it;
+therefore after dinner, as night was falling, I went alone to seek this
+mysterious thing.
+
+The air was sharp and biting, and unlike any I had experienced, and
+from behind the hillocks of sand, along which the path led, there came a
+faint but majestic noise. Everything affrighted me, the unfamiliar way,
+the twilight falling from the overcast sky, and the loneliness of this
+part of the village. But inspired by one of those great and sudden
+resolutions, that come sometimes to the most timid, I went forward with
+a firm step.
+
+Suddenly I stopped overcome and almost paralyzed by fear, for something
+took shape before me, something dark and surging sprang up from all
+sides at the same time and it seemed to stretch out endlessly. It was
+something so vast and full of motion that I was seized with a deadly
+vertigo--it was the sea of my imagining! Without a moment's hesitation,
+without asking how this knowledge had been wrought, without astonishment
+even, I recognized it and I trembled with a great emotion. It was
+so dark a green as to be almost black; to me it seemed unstable,
+perfidious, all ingulfing, always turbulent, and of a sinister, menacing
+aspect. Above it, in harmony with it, stretched the gray and lowering
+sky.
+
+And far away, very far away, upon the immeasurable distant horizon I
+perceived a break between the sky and the waters, and a pale yellow
+light showed through this cleft.
+
+Had I been to the sea before to recognize it thus quickly? Perhaps I
+had, but without being conscious of it, for when I was about five or
+six months old I had been brought to the Island by my great aunt, my
+grandmother's sister; or perhaps because it had played so great a part
+in my sea-faring ancestors' lives I was born with a nascent conception
+of it and its immensity.
+
+We communed together a moment, one with the other--I was deeply
+fascinated. At our first encounter I am sure I had a nebulous
+presentiment that I would one day go to it in spite of my hesitation,
+in spite of all the efforts put forth to hold me back,--and the emotion
+that overwhelmed me in the presence of the sea was not only one of
+fear, but I felt also an inexpressible sadness, and I seemed to feel the
+anguish of desolation, bereavement and exile. With downcast mien, and
+with hair blown about by the wind, I turned and ran home. I was in the
+extreme haste to be with my mother; I wished to embrace her and to cling
+close to her; I desired to be with her so that she might console me
+for the thousand indefinite, anticipated sorrows that surged through my
+heart at the sight of those green waters, so vast and so deep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+
+My mother!--I have already mentioned her two or three times in the
+course of this recital, but without stopping to speak of her at
+length. It seems that at first she was no more to me than a natural
+and instinctive refuge where I ran for shelter from all terrifying and
+unfamiliar things, from all the dark forebodings that had no real cause.
+
+But I believe she took on reality and life for the first time in the
+burst of ineffable tenderness which I felt when one May morning she
+entered my room with a bouquet of pink hyacinths in her hand; she
+brought in with her as she came a ray of sunlight.
+
+I was convalescing from one of the maladies peculiar to
+children,--measles or whooping cough, I know not which,--and I had been
+ordered to remain in bed and to keep warm. By the rays of light that
+filtered in through the closed shutters I divined the springtime warmth
+and brightness of the sun and air, and I felt sad that I had to remain
+behind the curtains of my tiny white bed; I wished to rise and go out;
+but most of all I had a desire to see my mother.
+
+The door opened and she entered, smiling. Ah, I remember it so well! I
+recall so distinctly how she looked as she stood upon the threshold
+of the door. And I remember that she brought in with her some of the
+sunlight and balminess of the spring day.
+
+I see again the expression of her face as she looked at me; and I hear
+the sound of her voice, and recall the details of her beloved dress that
+would look funny and old-fashioned to me now. She had returned from her
+morning shopping, and she wore a straw hat trimmed with yellow roses and
+a shawl of lilac barege (it was the period of the shawl) sprinkled with
+tiny bouquets of violets. Her dark curls (the poor beloved curls to-day,
+alas! so thin and white) were at this time without a gray hair. There
+was about her the fragrance of the May day, and her face as it looked
+that morning with its broad brimmed hat is still distinctly present with
+me. Besides the bouquet of pink hyacinths, she had brought me a tiny
+watering-pot, an exact imitation in miniature of the crockery ones so
+much used by the country people.
+
+As she leaned over my bed to embrace me I felt as if every wish was
+gratified. I no longer had a desire to weep, nor to rise from my bed,
+nor to go out. She was with me and that sufficed--I was consoled,
+tranquillized, and re-created by her gracious presence.
+
+I was, I think, a little more than three years old at this time, and my
+mother must have been about forty-two years of age; but I had not the
+least notion of age in regard to her, and it had never occurred to me
+to wonder whether she was young or old; nor did I realize until a later
+time that she was beautiful. No, at this period that she was her own
+dear self was enough; to me she was in face and form a person so apart
+and so unique that I would not have dreamed of comparing her with
+any one else. From her whole being there emanated such a joyousness,
+security and tenderness, and so much goodness that from thence was born
+my understanding of faith and prayer.
+
+I would that I could speak hallowed words to the first blessed form
+that I find in the book of memory. I would it were possible that I could
+greet my mother with words filled with the meaning I wish to convey.
+They are words which cause bountiful tears to flow, but tears fraught
+with I know not how much of the sweetness of consolation and joy, words
+that are ever, and in spite of everything, filled with the hope of an
+immortal reunion.
+
+And since I have touched upon this mystery that has had such an
+influence upon my soul, I will here set down that my mother alone is the
+only person in the world of whom I have the feeling that death cannot
+separate me. With other human beings, those whom I have loved with all
+my heart and soul, I have tried to imagine a hereafter, a to-morrow
+in which there shall be no to-morrow; but no, I cannot! Rather I have
+always had a horrible consciousness of our nothingness--dust to dust,
+ashes to ashes. Because of my mother alone have I been able to keep
+intact the faith of my early days. It still seems to me that when I
+have finished playing my poor part in life, when I no longer run in the
+overgrown paths that lead to the unattainable, when I am through amusing
+humanity with my conceits and my sorrows, I will go there where my
+mother, who has gone before me, is, and she will receive me; and the
+smile of serenity that she now wears in my memory will have become one
+of triumphant realization.
+
+True, I see that distant region only dimly, and it has no more substance
+than a pale gray vision; my words, however intangible and elusive, give
+too definite a form to my dreamy conceptions. But still (I speak as a
+little child, with the child's faith), but still I always think of my
+mother as having, in that far off place, preserved her earthly aspect.
+I think of her with her dear white curls and the straight lines of her
+beautiful profile that the years may have impaired a little, but which I
+still find perfect. The thought that the face of my mother shall one
+day disappear from my eyes forever, that it is no more than combined
+elements subject to disintegration, and that she will be lost in the
+universal abyss of nothingness, not only makes my heart bleed, but it
+causes me to revolt as at something unthinkable and monstrous; it cannot
+be! I have the feeling that there is about her something which death
+cannot touch.
+
+My love for my mother (the only changeless love of my life) is so free
+from all material feeling that that alone gives me an inexplicable hope,
+almost gives me a confidence in the immortality of the soul.
+
+I cannot very well understand why the vision of my mother near my bed of
+sickness should that morning have impressed me so vividly, for she was
+nearly always with me. It all seems very mysterious; it is as if at that
+particular moment she was for the first time revealed to me.
+
+And why among the treasured playthings of my childhood has the tiny
+watering-pot taken on the value and sacred dignity of a relic? So much
+so indeed, that when I am far distant on the ocean, in hours of danger,
+I think of it with tenderness, and see it in the place where it has
+lain for years, in the little bureau, never opened, mixed in with broken
+toys; and should it disappear I would feel as if I had lost an amulet
+that could not be replaced.
+
+And the simple shawl of lilac barege, found recently among some old
+clothing laid aside to be given to the poor, why have I put it away as
+carefully as if it were a priceless object? Because in its color (now
+faded), in its quaint Indian pattern and tiny bouquets of violets,
+I still find an emanation from my mother; I believe that I borrow
+therefrom a holy calm and sweet confidence that is almost a faith. And
+mingled in with the other feelings there is perhaps a melancholy regret
+for those May mornings of long ago that seemed so much brighter than are
+those of to-day.
+
+Truly I fear this book, the most personal I have ever written, will
+weary many.
+
+In transcribing these memories in the calm of middle life, so favorable
+to reverie, I had constantly present in my thought the lovely queen to
+whom I would dedicate this book; it is as if I were writing her a long
+letter with the full assurance of being understood in all those sacred
+matters to which words give but an inadequate expression.
+
+Perhaps you will understand also, my dear unknown readers, who with
+kindly sympathy have followed me thus far; and all those who cherish, or
+who have been cherished by their mothers will not smile at the childish
+things written down here.
+
+But this chapter will certainly seem ridiculous to those who are
+strangers to an all absorbing love, they will not be able to imagine
+that I have a deep pity to exchange for their cynical smiles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+
+Before I finish writing of the confused memories I have of the
+commencement of my life I wish to speak of another ray of sunshine--a
+sad ray this time,--that has left an ineffaceable impression upon me,
+and the meaning of which will never be clear to me.
+
+Upon a Sunday, after we had returned from church, the ray appeared to
+me. It came through a half-open window and fell into the stairway, and
+as it lengthened itself upon the whiteness of the wall it took on a
+peculiar, weird shape.
+
+I had returned from church with my mother and as I mounted the stairs I
+took her hand. The house was filled with a humming silence peculiar
+to the noontime of very hot summer days (it was August or September).
+Following the habit of our country the shutters were half closed making
+indoors, during the heated period of the day, a sort of twilight.
+
+As I entered the house there came to me an appreciation of the stillness
+of Sunday that in the country and in peaceful byways of little towns
+is like the peace of death. But when I saw the ray of sunlight fall
+obliquely through the staircase window, I had a feeling more poignant
+than ordinary sorrow; I had a feeling altogether incomprehensible and
+absolutely new in which there seemed infused a conception of the brevity
+of life's summers, their rapid flight and the incomputable ages of
+the sun. But other elements still more mysterious, that it would be
+impossible for me to explain even vaguely, entered therein.
+
+I wish to add to the history of this ray of sunshine the sequel that is
+intimately connected with it. Years passed; I became a man, and after
+having been among many people and experienced many adventures I lived
+for an autumn and winter in an isolated house in an unfrequented part
+of Stamboul. It was there that every evening at approximately the same
+hour, a ray of sunlight came in through the window and fell obliquely on
+the wall and lit up the niche (hollowed out of the stone wall) in which
+I had placed an Athenian vase. And I never saw that ray of sunlight
+without thinking of the one I had seen upon that Sunday of long ago;
+nor without having the same, precisely the same sad emotion, scarcely
+diminished by time, and always full of the same mystery. And when I
+had to leave Turkey, when I was obliged to quit my dangerous but adored
+lodgings in Stamboul, with all my busy and hurried preparations for
+departure there was mingled this strange regret: never more should I see
+the oblique ray of sunshine come into the stairway window and fall upon
+the niche in the wall where the Greek vase stood.
+
+Perhaps under all of this there may have been, if not recollections of
+a previous personal experience, at least the reflected inchoate thoughts
+of ancestors which I am unable in any clearer way to bring out of
+darkness. But enough! I must say no more, for I again find myself in the
+land of vague fancy, gliding phantoms and illusive nothings.
+
+For this almost unintelligible chapter there is no excuse that I can
+offer, save that I have written it with the greatest frankness and
+sincerity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+
+And I now recall the impressions of springtime, all the fresh splendor
+of May; and I remember vividly the lonely road called the Fountain road.
+
+(As I am endeavoring to put my recollections into some sort of order I
+think that at this time I must have been about five years old.)
+
+I was old enough at any rate to take walks with my father and my sister,
+and I went out with them this dewy morning. I was in ecstasy to see
+that everything had become so green, to see the budding foliage and the
+tasselled shrubs and hedges. Along the sides of the road the grass was
+all the same length, and the flowers in the grass with their exquisite
+mingling of the red of the geranium and the blue of the speedwell,
+made the whole earth seem a great bouquet. As I plucked the flowers I
+scarcely knew which way to run; in my eagerness I trod upon them and
+my legs became wet from the dew--I marvelled at all the richness at my
+disposal, and I longed to take great armfuls of the flowers and carry
+them away with me.
+
+My sister, who had gathered a sprig of hawthorn, one of iris and some
+long sheath-like grasses leaned towards me, and took my hand, and said:
+"You have enough for the present; you see, dear, that we could never
+gather all of them."
+
+But I did not heed, so absolutely intoxicated was I with the
+magnificence about me, the like of which I did not recall ever to have
+seen before.
+
+That was the beginning of those almost daily excursions that I took with
+my father and sister, and that I kept up for so long a time (almost
+to my boarding-school days). It is through them that I became so well
+acquainted with the surrounding country and with the varieties of
+flowers found there. Poor fields and meadows of my native country! So
+monotonous, so flat, one so like another; fields of hay and daisies
+where in childhood I would disappear from sight and hide under the green
+vegetation. Fields of corn and paths bordered with hawthorn, I love you
+all in spite of your monotony!
+
+Toward the west, in the far distance, my eyes sought for a glimpse of
+the sea. Sometimes when we had gone a long way there would appear upon
+the horizon, among the other lines there, a straight bluish one; it
+was the sea; and it lured me to it finally as a great and patient lover
+lures, who sure of his power is willing to wait.
+
+My sister and my brother, of whom I have not spoken before, were
+considerably older than I; it seemed almost as if we belonged to
+different generations. For that reason they petted me even more than did
+my father and mother, my grandmother and aunts; and as I was the only
+child among them I was cherished like a little hot-house plant, I was
+too tenderly guarded and remained all too unacquainted with thorns and
+brambles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+
+Someone has advanced the theory that those persons endowed with a gift
+for painting (either with color or with words) probably belong to a
+half-blind species; accustomed to living in a partial light, in a sort
+of misty grayness, they turn their gaze inward; and when by chance they
+do look out their impressions are ten times more vivid than are those of
+ordinary people.
+
+To me that seems a little paradoxical.
+
+But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer
+vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity
+about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the
+scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.
+
+In the course of my life I would without doubt have been less impressed
+by the ever shifting phantasmagoria of existence had I not begun my
+journey in a place almost without distinctive color, in a tranquil
+corner of the most commonplace little town, receiving an education
+austerely pious; and where my longest journey was bounded by the forests
+of Limoise (as wonderful to me as a primeval forest) and by the shores
+of the island of Oleron, that seemed very immense when I went to it to
+visit my aged aunts.
+
+But after all is said, it was in the yard about our house that I passed
+the happiest of my summers--it seemed to me that that was my particular
+kingdom, and I adored it.
+
+It was in truth a beautiful yard, much more sunny and airy than the
+majority of city gardens. Its long avenue of green and flowery branches,
+that overtopped the heads of the neighboring fruit trees, was bordered
+on the south by a low and ancient wall over which grew roses and
+honeysuckles. The long leafy avenue gave the impression of great depth,
+and its perspective melted into a bower of vines and jasmine bushes
+that in turn became a great verdant place, which came to an end at a
+storehouse of ancient construction, whose gray stones were hidden under
+ivy vines.
+
+Ah! How I loved that garden, and how much I still love it!
+
+I believe the keenest, earliest memories are of the beautiful long
+summer evenings. Oh! the return from a walk during those long, clear
+twilights that certainly were more delicious than are those of
+to-day. What joy to re-enter that yard which the thorn-apples and the
+honeysuckles filled with the sweetest odor, to enter and see from the
+gate all the long avenue of tangled greenness. Through an opening in a
+bower of Virginia Creeper I could see the rosy splendor of the setting
+sun; and somewhat removed in the gathering shadows of the foliage, there
+were distinguishable three or four persons. The persons, it is
+true, were very quiet and they were dressed in black, but they were
+nevertheless very reassuring to me, very familiar and very much beloved:
+they were the forms of mother, grandmother and aunts. Then I would run
+to them hastily and throw myself upon their laps, and that was always
+one of the happiest moments of my day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+
+In the month of March, as the shadows of twilight gathered, two little
+children were seated very close together upon a low footstool--two
+little ones, between the ages of five and six, dressed in short trousers
+with white pinafores over them, as was the fashion of the time. After
+having played wildly they were now quietly amusing themselves with paper
+and pencils. The dim light seemed to fill them with a vague fear, and it
+troubled their spirits.
+
+Of the two children only one was drawing--it was I. The other, a friend
+invited over for the day, an exceptional thing, was watching me with
+great attention. With some difficulty (trusting me meantime) he followed
+the fantastic movements of my pencil whose intention I took care to
+explain to him at some length. And my oral interpretation was necessary,
+for I was busy executing two drawings that I entitled respectively, "The
+Happy Duck" and "The Unhappy Duck."
+
+The room in which we were seated must have been furnished about the year
+1805, at the time of the marriage of my now-very-old grandmother, who
+still occupied it, and who this evening was seated in the chair of the
+Directory period; she was singing to herself and she took no notice of
+us.
+
+My memories of my grandmother are indistinct for her death occurred
+shortly after this time; but as I will never again, in the course of
+this recital, have a more vivid impression of her, I will here insert
+what I know of her history.
+
+It seems that in the stress of all sorts of troubles she had been a
+brave and noble mother. After reverses that were so general in those
+days, after losing her husband at the Battle of Trafalgar, and her
+elder son at the shipwreck of the Medusa, she went resolutely to work to
+educate her younger son, my father, until such time as he should be
+able to support himself. At about her eightieth year (which was not far
+distant when I came into the world) the senility of second childhood
+had set in; at that time I knew nothing about the tragedy of the loss of
+memory and I could not realize the vacancy of her mind and soul.
+
+She would often stand for a long time before a mirror and talk in a most
+amiable way to her own reflection, which she called, "my good neighbor"
+or "my dear neighbor." It was also her mania to sing with a most
+excessive ardor the Marseillaise, the Parisiennes, the "Song of
+Farewell," and all the noble songs of the transition time, which had
+been the rage in her young womanhood.
+
+During these exciting times she had lived quietly, and had occupied
+herself entirely with her household cares and her son's education. For
+that reason it seems the more singular that from her disordered mind,
+just about as it was to take its journey into complete darkness and to
+become disintegrated through death, there should come this tardy echo of
+that tempestuous time.
+
+I enjoyed listening to her very much and often I would laugh, but
+without any irreverence, and I never was the least afraid of her. She
+was extremely lovely and had delicate and regular features, and her
+expression was very sweet. Her abundant hair was silver-gray, and upon
+her cheeks there was a color similar to that of a faded rose leaf,
+a color which the old people of that generation often retained into
+extreme old age. I remember that she usually wore a red cashmere shawl
+about her shoulders, and that she always had on an old-fashioned cap
+trimmed with green ribbons. There was something very modest and gentle
+and pleasing about her still graceful little body.
+
+Her room, where I liked to come to play because it was so large and
+sunny, was furnished as simply as a Presbyterian parsonage: the waxed
+walnut furniture was of the Directory period, the large bed had a canopy
+of thick, red, cotton stuff and the walls were painted an ochre yellow;
+and upon them in gilt frames, slightly tarnished, were hung water colors
+representing vases of flowers. I very soon discovered that this room
+was furnished in a very simple and old-fashioned way, and I thought to
+myself that the good old grandmother who sang so constantly must be much
+poorer than my other grandmother, who was younger by twenty years,
+and who always dressed in black--which last matter seemed an elegant
+distinction to me.
+
+But to return to my drawings! I think that the pictures of those two
+ducks, occupying such different stations in life, were the first I ever
+drew.
+
+At the bottom of the picture called "The Happy Duck" I had drawn a tiny
+house, and near the duck himself there was a large, kind woman who was
+calling him to her so that she might give him food.
+
+"The Unhappy Duck," on the other hand, was swimming about solitary and
+alone on a sort of hazy sea, which I had represented by drawing two or
+three straight lines, and in the distance one could see the outline of a
+gloomy shore. The thin paper, a leaf torn from a book, had print on the
+reverse side, and the letters showed through in grayish flecks and gave
+the curious impression as of clouds in the sky. And that little drawing,
+with less form than a school-boy's blackboard scrawl, was completely
+transfigured by those gray spots, and because of them it took on for me
+a deep and dreadful significance. Aided by the dim light in the room the
+pictured scene became a vision that faded away into the distance like
+the pale surface of the sea. I was terrified at my own work; I was
+astonished to find in it those things that I had not put there; to
+discover in it those things which elsewhere had given me such a well
+remembered anguish.
+
+"Oh!" I said with exaltation to my young companion, who did not
+understand anything of what was going forward, "Oh!" I exclaimed with a
+voice full of emotion, "you may see it; I cannot bear to look at it!" I
+covered the picture with my hands, but nevertheless I peeped at it very
+often; and it was so vividly impressed upon my mind that I can still
+recall it as it appeared to me transfigured: a gleam of light lay upon
+the horizon of that sea so awkwardly represented, the heavens appeared
+to be filled with rain, and it seemed to be a dreary winter evening in
+which there was a fierce wind blowing.
+
+The "Unhappy Duck" solitary, far away from his family and friends was
+making his way toward the foggy shore over which there hung an air of
+extreme sadness and desolation. And certainly for one fleeting moment
+I had a prescience of those heartaches that I was to know later in
+the course of my sailor life. I seemed to have a presentiment of those
+stormy December evenings when my boat was to enter, to take shelter
+until the morning, one of those uninhabited bays upon the coast of
+Brittany; more particularly I had a prescience of those twilights of the
+Antarctic winter when, in about the latitude of Magellan, we were to
+go in search of protection towards those sterile shores that are as
+inhospitable and as absolutely deserted as the waters surrounding them.
+
+The vision faded and I once more found myself in my grandmother's
+large room enveloped in the shadows of the evening. My grandmother was
+singing, and I was again a tiny being who had seen nothing of the large
+world, who had fears without knowing wherefore, and who did not even
+know the cause of the tears that he shed.
+
+Since then I have often observed that the rudimentary scrawls made by
+children, and which as representations are incorrect and inadequate,
+impress them much more than do the able and correct drawing of adults.
+For although theirs are incomplete they add to them a thousand things of
+their own seeing and imagining; and they add to them also the thousand
+things that grow in the deep subsoil of their consciousness--the things
+which no brush would be able to paint.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+
+Upon the second floor, above the room occupied by my poor old
+grandmother, who sang the Marseillaise so constantly, in that part of
+the house overlooking the yard and the gardens, lived my great-aunt
+Bertha.
+
+From her windows, across the houses and the walls covered with roses and
+jasmine, one could see the ramparts of the town. They were so near to
+us that their old trees were visible; and beyond them lay those great
+plains of our country called prees (prairies) all so alike, and as
+monotonous as the neighboring seas. From the window one also saw the
+river. At full tide, when it almost overflowed its banks, it looked,
+as it wound along through the green meadows, like silver lace; and the
+large and small boats that passed in the far distance mounted upon this
+silver thread toward the harbor and from there sailed out into the great
+sea.
+
+As this was our only glimpse of real country the windows in my aunt
+Bertha's room had always a great attraction for me. Especially had
+they in the evening at sunset, for from them I could watch the sun sink
+mysteriously behind the prairies. Oh! those sunsets that I saw from
+my aunt Bertha's windows, what ecstasy overcast with melancholy they
+awakened in me! The winter sunsets seen through the closed windows were
+a pale rose color. Those of summer time, upon stormy evenings, after a
+hot, bright day, I contemplated from the open window, and as I did so
+I would breathe in the sweet odors given out by the jasmine blossoms
+growing on the wall: it seems to me that there are no such sunsets now
+as there were then. When the sunsets were notably splendid and unusual,
+if I was not in the room, aunt Bertha, who never missed one, would call
+out hastily: "Dearie! Dearie! Come quickly!" From any corner of the
+house I heard that call and understood it, and I went swift as a
+hurricane and mounted the stairs four steps at a time. I mounted the
+more rapidly because the stairway had already begun to fill with dread
+shadows; and in the turnings and corners I saw the imaginary forms of
+ghosts and monsters that at nightfall always pursued me as I ran up the
+stairs.
+
+My aunt Bertha's room, with its simple white muslin curtains, was as
+modest as my grandmother's. The walls, covered with an old-fashioned
+paper in vogue at the commencement of the century, were ornamented with
+water colors similar to those in my grandmother's room. The picture that
+I looked at most often was a pastel after Raphael of a virgin in white,
+blue and rose color. The rays of the setting sun always fell upon this
+picture (I have already said the hour of sunset was the time I preferred
+most to be in this room). This virgin was very much like my aunt Bertha;
+in spite of the great difference in their ages, one was struck with the
+resemblance between the straight lines and regularity of their profiles.
+
+On this same floor, but upon the street side, lived my other grandmother
+(the one who always dressed in black) and her daughter, my aunt Claire,
+the person in the house who petted me most.
+
+Upon winter evenings, after I had been to my aunt Bertha's room to
+see the sunset, it was my custom to go to them. I usually found them
+together in my grandmother's room and I would seat myself near the fire
+in a little chair placed there for me. But the twilight hour spent with
+them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the amusements, all
+the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk almost motionless
+upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily watching for the least
+change in the shadows, especially on that side of the room where the
+door opened on the dim stairway, was very painful to me. . . . I am sure
+that if my grandmother and aunt had known of the melancholy and terrors
+which the twilight induced in me, they would have spared me by lighting
+the lamp, but they did not know my sufferings; and it was the custom
+of the aged persons by whom I was surrounded, to sit tranquilly at
+nightfall in their accustomed places without having need for a lighted
+lamp. As it grew darker one or the other, grandmother or aunt, would
+draw her chair closer to me, and when I had that protection about me
+I felt completely happy and reassured and would say: "Please tell me
+stories about the Island."
+
+The Island, that is the Island of Oleron, was my mother's native place,
+my grandmother's and aunt's also, which they had quitted twenty years
+before my birth to establish themselves upon the main land. The Island,
+or the least thing that came from it, had a singular charm for me.
+
+It was quite near us, for from a garret window at the top of the house
+we could, upon a very clear day, see the extreme end of its extensive
+plain; it appeared a little bluish line against a still paler one which
+was the arm of the ocean separating us from it. . . . To get to it we
+had to take a long journey in wretched country wagons and in sailing
+boats; and often our boat had to make its way there in the teeth of
+a strong gale. At this time in the village of St. Pierre Oleron I had
+three old aunts who lived very modestly upon the revenues of their salt
+marshes (the remains of a once great inheritance), and their annual
+rents which the peasants still paid with sacks of wheat. . . . When I
+went to visit them at St. Pierre there was for me a certain joy, mingled
+with many kinds of conflicting emotions, which I cannot explain, in
+trying to picture to myself their once great station.
+
+The Huguenot austerity of their manners, their mode of life, their house
+and their furniture all belonged to a past time, to a bygone generation.
+The sea surrounded and isolated us, and the wind constantly swept over
+the moorland and over the great stretches of sandy beach.
+
+My nurse was also from the Island, of a Huguenot family, which
+descending from father to son had been with us for a long time; and she
+would say: "At home, on the Island," in such a way that with a wave of
+emotion I understood her great homesickness for it.
+
+We had about us a number of little articles that had come from there,
+and which had places of honor in our home. We had some black pebbles
+large as cannon-balls, that had been chosen from the thousands lying
+on the Long-Beach because centuries of washing had polished and rounded
+them exquisitely. These pebbles always played an important part every
+winter evening, for with the greatest regularity the old people would
+put them into the chimney-place where a wood fire blazed and crackled;
+afterwards they slipped them into calico bags of a flowered pattern,
+also brought from the Island, and took them to bed where they served to
+keep their feet warm during the night.
+
+In our cellar we had wooden props and firkins, and also a number of
+straight elm poles for holding the washing which had been cut from the
+choicest young trees in my grandmother's forest. I had the greatest
+veneration for all these things. I knew that my grandmother no longer
+owned the forests, nor the salt marshes, nor the vineyards; for I had
+heard them say that she had sold them one at a time to put the money
+into investments upon the mainland; and that an incompetent notary by
+his bad investments had greatly reduced her income.
+
+When I went to the Island and the old salt makers and vine dressers, who
+had at one time worked for our family, still loyal and respectful called
+me "our little master," I knew they did so out of pure politeness and
+altogether in deference to our past grandeur.
+
+I regretted that I could not spend my life in tending the vineyards and
+the harvests, the occupations of several of my ancestors. Such a life
+seemed a much more desirable one to me than my own which was passed in a
+house in town.
+
+The stories of the Island that my grandmother and aunt Claire related to
+me were generally of the happenings of their own childhood, a childhood
+that seemed so very far away that to me it had no more reality than a
+dream.
+
+There were stories of grandfathers, long dead; of great-uncles whom I
+had never known, dead also for many years. When my aunt told me their
+names and described them to me I would abandon myself to reverie. There
+was in particular a grandfather Samuel who had preached at the time of
+the religious persecution, whom I thought an extraordinarily interesting
+person.
+
+I did not care whether the stories were different or not, and I would
+ask for the same ones over and over. Often they told me stories of
+journeys they had taken on the little donkeys that played such an
+important part in the lives of the people of St. Pierre. They would ride
+upon them to visit distant properties and vineyards; to get to these
+it was often necessary to travel along the sands of the Long-Beach, and
+sometimes of an evening during these expeditions terrible storms would
+burst upon the travellers and compel them to take shelter for the night
+in the inns and farmhouses.
+
+And as I sat in the darkness that no longer had terrors for me, my
+imagination busy with the things and peoples of other days, tinkle,
+tinkle would go the dinner bell; then I rose and jumped for joy, and
+we would go down to the dining-room together and find all the family
+gathered there in the bright gay room: then I would run to my mother and
+in an excess of emotion hide my face in her dress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+
+Gaspard was a little crop-eared dog who was saved from absolute
+homeliness by the vivacious and kindly expression of his eyes. I do not
+now recall how he came to domesticate himself with us, but I do know
+that I loved him very tenderly.
+
+One winter afternoon, when he and I were out for a walk, he ran away
+from me. I consoled myself, however, by saying that he would certainly
+return to the house alone, and I went home in a happy frame of mind. But
+when night came and he was still absent I grew very heavy of heart.
+
+My parents had at dinner that evening an accomplished violinist and they
+had given me permission to remain up later than usual so that I might
+hear him. The first sweep of his bow which preluded I know not what slow
+and desolate movement, sounded to me like an invocation to those dark
+woodland paths in which, in the deeps of night, one feels that he is
+lost and abandoned; as the musician played I had a vision of Gaspard
+mistaking his way at the cross-roads because of the rain, and I saw him
+take an unfamiliar path that led forever away from friends and home.
+Then my tears began to flow, but no one perceived them; and as I wept
+the violin continued to fill the silence with its sad wailing, and it
+seemed to get a response from bottomless abysses inhabited by phantoms
+to which I could give neither a form nor name.
+
+That was my introduction to reverie awaking music, and years passed
+before I again experienced such sensations, for the little piano pieces
+that I began to play for myself soon after this (in a remarkable way for
+a child of my age they said) sounded to me only like sweet, rhythmical
+noise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+
+I wish now to speak of the anguish caused by a story that was read to
+me. (I seldom read for myself, and in fact I disliked books very much.)
+
+A very disobedient little boy who had run away from his family and his
+native land, years later, after the death of his parents and his sister,
+returned alone to visit his parental home. This took place in November,
+and naturally the author described the dull gray sky and spoke of the
+bleak wind that blew the few remaining leaves from the trees.
+
+In a deserted garden, in an arbor stripped of all its green, the
+prodigal son in stooping down found among the autumn leaves a bluish
+bead that had lain there since the time he had played in the bower with
+his sister.
+
+Oh! at that point I begged them to cease reading, for I felt the sobs
+coming. I could see, see vividly, that solitary garden, that leafless
+old arbor, and half-hidden under the reddish leaves I saw that blue
+bead, souvenir of the dead sister. . . . It depressed me dreadfully and
+gave me a conception of that inevitable fading away of everything and
+every one, of the great universal change that comes to all.
+
+It is strange that my tenderly guarded infancy should have been so full
+of sad emotions and morbid reflections.
+
+I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived
+the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the
+happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind,
+and I can no longer recall them.
+
+My memories of the summer time are so similar that they break with the
+splendor of the sun into the dark places and things of my mind.
+
+And always the great heat, the deep blue skies, the sparkling sand
+of the beach and the flood of light upon the white lime walls of the
+cottages of the little villages upon the "Island" induced in me a
+melancholy and sleepiness which I afterwards experienced with even
+greater intensity in the land of the Turk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+
+"And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go
+ye out to meet him. . . . And they that were ready went in with him
+to the marriage; and the door was shut. Afterward came also the other
+virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
+
+"But he answered and said, Verily, I say unto you, I know you not.
+
+"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the
+Son of man cometh."
+
+After reading these verses in a loud voice, my father closed the Bible;
+in the room where we were assembled there was a sound of chairs being
+moved and we all went down upon our knees to pray. Following the usage
+in old Huguenot families, it was our custom to have prayers just before
+retiring to our rooms for the night.
+
+"And the door was shut. . . ." Although I still knelt I no longer heard
+the prayer, for the foolish virgins appeared to me. They were enveloped
+in white veils that billowed about them as they stood before the door
+holding in their hands the little lamps whose flickering flames were so
+soon to be extinguished, leaving them in the gloom without before that
+closed door, closed against them irrevocably and forever. . . . And a
+time could come then when it would be too late; when the Saviour weary
+of our trespassing would no longer listen to our supplications! I had
+never thought that that was possible. And a fear more terrifying and
+awful than any I had ever known before completely overwhelmed me at the
+thought of eternal damnation. . . .
+
+* * * * *
+
+For a long time, for many weeks and months, the parable of the foolish
+virgins haunted me. And every evening, when darkness came, I would
+repeat to myself the words that sounded so beautiful and yet so
+dismaying: "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour
+wherein the Son of man cometh." If he should come to-night, was ever
+my thought, I would be awakened by a noise as of the sound of rushing
+waters, by the blare of the trumpet of the angel of the Lord announcing
+the terrifying approach of the end of the world. And I could never go to
+sleep until I had said a long prayer in which I commended myself to the
+mercy of my Saviour.
+
+I do not believe there was ever a little child who had a more sensitive
+conscience than I; about everything I was so morbidly scrupulous that I
+was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused
+me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having been tormented
+for days merely because in relating something I had not reported
+it precisely as it had happened. And to such a point did I carry my
+squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my recital or
+statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one who tells
+over his beads, these words: "After all, perhaps I do not remember just
+exactly how it was." When I think of the thousand remorses and fears
+which my trifling wrong doings caused me, and which from my sixth to
+my eighth year cast a gloom over my childhood, I feel a sort of
+retrospective depression.
+
+At that period if any one asked me what I hoped to be in the future,
+when a man, without hesitation I would answer: "I expect to be a
+minister,"--and to me the religious vocation seemed the very grandest
+one. And those about me would smile and without doubt they thought,
+inasmuch as I too wished it, that it was the best career for me.
+
+In the evening, especially at night, I meditated constantly of that
+hereafter which to pronounce the name of filled me with terror:
+eternity. And my departure from this earth,--this earth which I had
+scarcely seen, of which I had seen no more than the tiniest and most
+colorless corner--seemed to me a thing very near at hand. With a
+blending of impatience and mortal fear I thought of myself as soon to
+be clothed in a resplendent white robe, as soon to be seated in a great
+splendor of light among the multitude of angels and chosen ones around
+the throne of the Blessed Lamb; I saw myself in the midst of a
+great moving orb that, to the sound of music, oscillated slowly and
+continuously in the infinite void of heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+
+"Once upon a time a little girl when she opened a large fruit that had
+come from the colonies, a big creature came out of it, a green creature,
+and it bit her and that made her die."
+
+It was my little friend Antoinette (she was six and I seven) who was
+telling me the story which had been suggested to her because we were
+about to break and divide an apricot between us. We were at the extreme
+end of her garden in the lovely month of June under a branching apricot
+tree. We sat very close together upon the same stool in a house about as
+big as a bee-hive, which we had built for our exclusive use out of old
+planks. Our dwelling was covered with pieces of foreign matting that had
+come from the Antilles packed about some boxes of coffee. The sunbeams
+pierced the roof, which was of a coarse straw-colored material, and
+the warm breeze that stirred the leaves of the trees about us made the
+sunlight dance as it fell upon our faces and aprons. (During at least
+two summers it had been our favorite amusement to build, in isolated
+nooks, houses like the one described in Robinson Crusoe, and thus hidden
+away we would sit together and chat.) In the story of the little girl
+who was bitten by the big creature this phrase, "a very large fruit
+from the colonies," had suddenly plunged me into a reverie. And I had
+a vision of trees, of strange fruits, and of forests filled with
+marvelously colored birds. Ah! how much those magical but disturbing
+words, "the colonies" conveyed to me in my childhood. To me they meant
+at that time all tropical and distant countries, which I invariably
+thought of as filled with giant palms, exquisite flowers, strange black
+people and great animals. Although my ideas were so confused I had an
+almost true conception, amounting to an intuition, of their mournful
+splendor and their enervating melancholy.
+
+I think that I saw a palm for the first time in an illustrated book
+called the "Young Naturalists," by Madame Ulliac-Tremadeure; the book
+was one of my New Year's gifts, and I read some parts of it upon New
+Year's evening. (Green-house palms had not at that time been brought to
+our little town.)
+
+The illustrator had placed two of these unfamiliar trees at the edge
+of a sea-shore along which negroes were passing. Recently I was curious
+enough to hunt in the little yellow, faded book for that picture, and
+truly I wonder how that illustration had the power to create the very
+least of my dreams unless it were that my immature mind was already
+leavened by the memory of memories.
+
+"The colonies!" Ah! how can I give an adequate idea of all that awoke
+in my mind at the sound of these words? A fruit from there, a bird or a
+shell, had instantly the greatest charm for me.
+
+There were a number of things from the tropics in little Antoinette's
+home: a parrot, birds of many colors in a cage, and collections of
+shells and insects. In one of her mamma's bureau drawers I had seen
+quaint necklaces of fragrant berries; in the garret, where we sometimes
+rummaged, we found skins of animals and peculiar bags and cases upon
+which could still be made out the names of towns in the Antilles; and a
+faint tropical odor scented the entire house.
+
+Antoinette's garden, as I have said, was separated from ours by a very
+low wall overgrown with roses and jasmine. And the very old pomegranate
+tree growing there spread its branches into our yard, and at the
+blooming season its coral-red petals were scattered upon our grass.
+
+Often we spoke from one house to the other:
+
+"Can I come over and play with you?" I would ask. "Will your mamma allow
+me?"
+
+"No, because I have been naughty and I am being punished." (That
+happened very often.)--Such an answer always grieved me a great deal;
+but I must confess that it was more on account of my disappointment over
+the parrot and the tropical things than because of her punishment.
+
+Little Antoinette had been born in the colonies, but, curiously enough,
+she never seemed to value that fact, and they had very little charm for
+her, indeed she scarcely remembered them. I would have given everything
+I possessed in the world to have seen, if only for the briefest time,
+one of those distant countries, inaccessible to me, as I well knew.
+
+With a regret that was almost anguish I thought, alas! that in my life
+as minister, live as long as I might, I would never, never see those
+enchanting lands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+
+I will now describe a game that gave Antoinette and me the greatest
+pleasure during those two delicious summers.
+
+We pretended to be two caterpillars, and we would creep along the ground
+upon our stomachs and our knees and hunt for leaves to eat. After having
+done that for some time we played that we were very very sleepy, and we
+would lie down in a corner under the trees and cover our heads with our
+white aprons--we had become cocoons. We remained in this condition for
+some time, and so thoroughly did we enter into the role of insects in
+a state of metamorphosis, that any one listening would have heard pass
+between us, in a tone of the utmost seriousness, conversations of this
+nature:
+
+"Do you think that you will soon be able to fly?"
+
+"Oh yes! I'll be flying very soon; I feel them growing in my shoulders
+now . . . they'll soon unfold." ("They" naturally referred to wings.)
+
+Finally we would wake up, stretch ourselves, and without saying anything
+we conveyed by our manner our astonishment at the great transformation
+in our condition. . . .
+
+Then suddenly we began to run lightly and very nimbly in our tiny shoes;
+in our hands we held the corners of our pinafores which we waved as if
+they were wings; we ran and ran, and chased each other, and flew about
+making sharp and fantastic curves as we went. We hastened from flower
+to flower and smelled all of them, and we continually imitated the
+restlessness of giddy moths; we imagined too that we were imitating
+their buzzing when we exclaimed: "Hou ou ou!" a noise we made by filling
+the cheeks with air and puffing it out quickly through the half-closed
+mouth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+
+The butterflies, the poor butterflies that have gone out of fashion in
+these days, played, I am ashamed to say, a large part in my life during
+my childhood, as did also the flies, beetles and lady-bugs and all the
+insects that are found upon flowers and in the grass. Although it gave
+me a great deal of pain to kill them, I was making a collection of them,
+and I was almost always seen with a butterfly net in my hand. Those
+flying about in our yard, that had strayed our way from the country,
+were not very beautiful it must be confessed, but I had the garden and
+woods of Limoise which all the summer long was a hunting-ground ever
+full of surprises and wonders.
+
+But the caricatures by Topffer upon this subject made me thoughtful; and
+when Lucette one day caught me with several butterflies in my hat, and
+in her incomparably mocking voice called me, "Mr. Cryptogram," I was
+much humiliated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+
+The poor old grandmother who sang so constantly was dying.
+
+We were all standing about her bed at nightfall one spring evening. She
+had been ailing scarcely more than forty-eight hours; but the doctor
+said that on account of her great age she could not rally, and he
+pronounced her end to be very near.
+
+Her mind had become clear; she no longer mistook our names, and in a
+sweet calm voice she begged us to remain near her--it was doubtless the
+voice of other days, the one that I had never heard before.
+
+As I stood close to my father's side I turned my eyes from my dying
+grandmother, and they wandered about the room with its old-fashioned
+furniture. I looked especially at the pictures of bouquets in vases
+that hung upon the wall. Oh! those poor little water colors in my
+grandmother's room, how ingenuous they were! They all bore this
+inscription: "A Bouquet for my mother," and under this there was a
+little verse of four lines dedicated to her which I could now read and
+understand. These works of art had been painted by my father in his
+early boyhood, and he had presented them to his mother upon each joyful
+anniversary. The poor, unpretentious little pictures bore testimony
+to the humble life of those early days, and they spoke of the sacred
+intimacy of mother and son,--they had been painted during the time which
+followed those great ordeals, the wars, the English invasion and the
+burning over of the country by the enemy. For the first time I realized
+that my grandmother too had been young; that, without doubt, before the
+trouble with her head, my father had loved her as I loved my mamma, and
+I felt that he would sorrow greatly when he lost her; I felt sorry for
+him and I was also full of remorse because I had laughed at her singing,
+and had been amused when she spoke to her image reflected in the
+looking-glass.
+
+They sent me down stairs. On different pretexts, the reason for which
+I did not understand, they kept me away from the room until the day was
+over; then they took me to the house of our friends, the D----s, where I
+was to have dinner with Lucette.
+
+When, at about half past eight, I returned home with my nurse, I
+insisted upon going straight to my grandmother's room.
+
+When I entered I was struck with the order and the air of profound peace
+that pervaded the room. My father was sitting motionless at the head of
+the bed--he was in the shadow, the open curtains were draped with great
+precision, and on the pillow, just in its middle, was the head of my
+sleeping grandmother; her whole position had about it something very
+regular--something that suggested eternal rest.
+
+My mother and sister were seated beside a chiffonier near the door, from
+which place they had kept watch over my grandmother during her illness.
+As soon as I entered they signalled to me with their hands as if to say:
+"Softly, softly, make no noise; she is asleep." The shade of their lamp
+threw a vivid light upon the material they were busied with, a number
+of little silk squares, brown, yellow, gray, etc., that I recognized as
+pieces of their old dresses and hat ribbons.
+
+At first I thought that they were working upon things which it is
+customary to prepare for people about to die; but when I, in a very low
+voice and with some uneasiness, questioned them about it, they explained
+that they were making sachets which were to be sold for charity.
+
+I said that I wished to bid grandmother good night before retiring, and
+they allowed me to go towards the bed; but before I reached the middle
+of the room they, after glancing quickly at each other, changed their
+minds.
+
+"No, no," they said in a very low voice, "come back, you might disturb
+her."
+
+But before they spoke I came to a halt of myself, I was overwhelmed with
+terror--I understood.
+
+Although fear kept me fixed to the spot I noted with astonishment that
+my grandmother was not at all disagreeable to look at; I had never
+before seen a dead person, and I had imagined until then, that when
+the spirit took its departure all that remained was a grinning, hideous
+skeleton. On the contrary my grandmother had upon her face an extremely
+sweet and tranquil smile; she was as beautiful as ever, and her face
+appeared to be rejuvenated and filled with a holy peace.
+
+Then there passed through my mind one of those sad flashes which
+sometimes come to little children and permit them to see for a moment
+into hidden depths, and I reflected: How can grandmother be in heaven,
+how am I to understand the division of the one body into two parts, for
+that which was left for interment, was it not my grandmother herself,
+ah! was it not she even to the very expression that she bore in life?
+
+After that I stole away with a bruised heart and downcast spirit,
+not daring to ask a question of any one, fearful lest what I had so
+unerringly divined would be confirmed, I did not wish to hear the dread
+and terrible word pronounced. . . .
+
+* * * * *
+
+For a long time thereafter little silken sachet bags were always
+associated in my mind with the idea of death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+
+I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious
+illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me
+called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical
+quality.
+
+I had the fever in March, which was cold and blustering and dreary that
+year, and every evening as night fell, if by chance my mother was not
+near me, a great sadness would overwhelm my soul. (It was an oppression
+coming on at twilight, from which animals, and beings with a temperament
+like mine suffer almost equally.)
+
+My curtains were kept open, and I always had a view of the pathetic
+looking little table with its cups of gruel and bottles of medicines.
+And as I gazed at these things, so suggestive of sickness, they took on
+strange shapes in the darkness of the silent room,--and at such times
+there passed through my head a procession of grotesque, hideous and
+alarming images.
+
+Upon two successive evenings at dusk there appeared to me, in the half
+delirium of fever, two persons who caused me the most extreme terror.
+
+The first one was an old woman, hump-backed and very ugly, but with a
+fascinating ugliness, who without my hearing her open the door, without
+my seeing any one rise to meet her, stole noiselessly to my side. She
+departed, however, without speaking to me; but as she turned to go her
+hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and
+there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the
+old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, "Cuckoo," in
+a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the
+frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that "Cuckoo!" a cold
+perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared
+and then I realized that it was only a dream.
+
+The next evening a tall thin man, clothed in the black dress of a
+minister, appeared to me. He did not come near me, but kept close to the
+wall and whirled, with body all bent over, rapidly and noiselessly about
+the room. His miserable, thin legs and the gown of his dress stood out
+stiff and straight as he turned quickly. And--most horrible of all--he
+had for a head the skull of a large white bird with a long beak, which
+was a monstrous exaggeration of a sea-mew's skull, bleached by the sun
+and wind and waves, that I had the previous summer found upon the beach
+at the Island. (I believe this old man's visit coincided with the
+time when I was worst, almost in danger.) After he had made one or two
+revolutions about the room, he quickly and silently began to rise from
+the floor. Ever moving his thin legs he reached the cornice, then higher
+and higher still he rose, above the pictures and the looking-glasses,
+until he was lost to sight in the twilight shadows that lay near the
+ceiling.
+
+And for two or three years after this event the faces of those visions
+haunted me. On winter evenings I thought of them with a shudder as
+I mounted the stairway, which at that period it was not customary to
+light. "If they should be there," I would say to myself; "suppose one of
+them is lying in wait to pursue me, and stretch out their hands and try
+to catch me by the legs."
+
+And truly I will not be sure that I would not now feel, should I
+encourage myself, some of the old-time fear which that woman and man
+inspired in me; they were for some time at the head of the list of my
+childhood terrors, and for very long they led the procession of visions
+and bad dreams.
+
+Many gloomy apparitions haunted the first years of my life which
+otherwise were so uncommonly sweet. I was especially addicted to
+indulging in sad reflections at nightfall; I had impressions of my
+career being cut short by an early death. Too carefully sheltered and
+protected at this period, and yet in some measure forced mentally, I may
+be likened to a flower that lacks color and vitality because it has been
+raised in an unwholesome atmosphere. I should have been surrounded by
+hardy, mischievous, noisy playmates of my own age and sex, but instead
+of that I played only with gentle little girls. I was always careful and
+precise in my manners, and my curled hair and sedate bearing gave me the
+appearance of a little eighteenth century nobleman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+
+After that long fever, the very name of which has a sinister sound, I
+recall the delight I felt when they allowed me to go out into the air,
+when I was permitted to go down into our beloved yard. The day chosen
+for my first airing was a radiantly beautiful and clear morning in
+April. Seated under the bower of jasmine and honeysuckle I felt as if
+I were experiencing the enchantment of paradise, of another Eden.
+Everything was budding and blossoming; without my knowledge, during the
+time that I was confined to my bed, this wonderful drama of the spring
+had enacted itself upon the earth. I had not often seen this wonderful
+and magical renewal which has delighted man through all the ages, and to
+which only the very aged seem indifferent; it ravished me and I
+allowed my joy to take possession of me almost to the point of
+intoxication.--Oh! that pure, warm, soft air; the glorious sunlight and
+the tender, fresh green of the young plants and the budding trees
+that already cast a little shade. And in myself there was an unwonted
+strength that bespoke recovery, and I rejoiced mightily when I breathed
+in the sweet air and felt the flood of new life.
+
+My brother was a tall fellow of twenty-one who had the freedom of the
+house and grounds in which to work out any of his fancies. During my
+convalescence I entertained myself greatly speculating about something
+he was busy with in the garden, which something I was dying of
+impatience to see. At the end of the yard, in a lovely nook under an
+old plum tree, my brother was making a tiny lake; he had dug it out and
+cemented it like a cistern, and from the country round about he procured
+stones and quantities of moss with which to make the banks about the
+lake romantic looking; he also constructed rocky elevations and grottoes
+out of stones and mosses.
+
+And this work was finished the day that I went out for the first time;
+they had even put little gold fish into the water, and they turned on
+the tiny fountain and it played in my honor.
+
+I approached it with ecstasy, and I found that it greatly surpassed in
+beauty anything that my imagination had been able to conjure up. And
+when my brother told me it was mine, I felt a joy so intense that it
+seemed to me it must last forever. Oh! what unexpected joy to possess it
+for my very own! And what happiness to know that I could enjoy it every
+single day during the warm and beautiful months that were to come. And
+the thought of being able to live out of doors again, the prospect of
+playing in every nook of that lovely garden, as I had done the previous
+summer, was rapture to me.
+
+I remained at the edge of the pond a long time, looking at it and
+admiring it unceasingly, and I breathed in the sweet, mild spring air,
+and warmed myself in the radiant sunlight so long denied to me. The old
+plum tree above my head, planted so long ago by one of my ancestors, and
+now almost at the end of its usefulness, spread its lacy curtain of new
+leaves to the tender blue of the sky, and the tiny fountain in its
+shade continued its tuneful melody as if it were a little hurdy-gurdy
+celebrating my return to health.
+
+To-day that old plum tree is dead and its trunk the only thing left of
+it, and spared out of respect, is covered, like a ruin, with ivy vines.
+
+But the pond, with its grottoes and islets, still remains intact; time
+has given it the appearance of genuine nature herself. Its greenish
+stones look old and decayed; the mosses, the delicate little plants
+brought from the river, and the rushes and wild iris have acclimated
+themselves, and dragon flies that stray through the town take refuge
+there--a bit of wild nature has established itself in that little corner
+and I hope it will never be disturbed.
+
+I am more loyally attached to that spot than to any other, although
+I have loved many places; in no other one have I found so much peace;
+there I feel tranquil, there I refresh myself and acquire youth and new
+life. That little corner is my sacred Mecca, so much indeed is it to me
+that should any one destroy it I would feel as if some vital thing in
+my life had lost balance, would feel that I had missed my footing, or
+almost imagine that it presaged the beginning of my end.
+
+The reverent feeling that I have for the place has been born, I believe,
+from my sea-faring life, with its long voyages to distant places and its
+dreary exiles during which I thought and dreamed of it constantly.
+
+There is in particular one little grotto for which I have an especial
+affection: the memory of it has often, in times of depression and
+melancholy, during the years of weary exile heartened me.
+
+After the angel Azrael had so cruelly passed our way, after reverses of
+many sorts, and during that sad term when I was a wanderer on the face
+of the earth, and my widowed mother and my aunt Claire were left alone
+in the beloved but deserted home that was almost as silent as a tomb, I
+experienced many a heartache as I thought of the dear hearthstone and of
+the things so familiar to my childhood that were doubtless going to
+ruin through neglect. I felt especially anxious to know if the storms
+of winter and the hands of time had destroyed the delicate arch of that
+grotto; and strange as it may seem, if those little moss-covered rocks
+had fallen in I would have felt that an almost irreparable breach had
+been made in my own life.
+
+At the side of the pond there is an old gray wall which is an integral
+part of the corner that I call my Holy Mecca; I think it is the very
+centre of the sacred place, and I recall the tiniest details of it. I
+can picture to myself the scarcely visible mosses that grow there, and
+the gaps made by time, which the spiders now inhabit. Growing up at the
+back of the wall there is an arbor of ivy and honeysuckles whose shade
+I sought daily every beautiful summer day for the purpose of studying my
+lessons. But I lounged there lazily, as a school-boy will, and allowed
+all my attention to be absorbed by those gray stones with their teeming
+world of insects. Not only do I love and venerate that old wall as the
+Moslems love their holiest mosque, but I regard it also as something
+which actually protects me; as something which conserves my life and
+prolongs my youth. I would not suffer any one to change it in the least,
+and should it be demolished I would feel as if the very supports under
+my life were insecure. May it not be because certain things persist,
+and are known to us throughout our lives, that we borrow from thence
+delusions in regard to our own stability and our own continuance. Seeing
+that they abide we suppose that we cannot change nor cease to be.
+
+Personally I cannot explain these sentiments of mine in any other way
+than to regard them as some sort of fetich worship.
+
+And when I consider that those stones are very like other stones, that
+they have been brought from I know not where, by whom I care not, to be
+built into a wall by workmen who lived and died a century before I was
+even thought of, I realize the childishness of the illusion, which I
+indulge in spite of myself, that it can extend any sort of spiritual
+protection to me; I comprehend only too well what a frail and unstable
+base has that that symbolizes for me the permanency of life.
+
+Those who have never had a permanent home, but who have from infancy
+been taken from place to place, living in lodgings meantime, may not be
+able to appreciate these sentiments.
+
+But among those who have daily gathered about the same hearthstone,
+there are, I am sure, many who, without confessing it, are susceptible
+in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people
+often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since
+childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of
+their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their
+lives, seek a warrant for their own hope of immortality?
+
+And doubtless, alas! before their birth these objects lent the same
+delusive countenance to others, to those unknown now turned to dust and
+gone to nothingness, who may not even have been of their blood and race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+
+It was about the middle of the summer, after my severe illness, that I
+went to the Island for a long visit. I was taken there by my brother and
+my sister, the latter was like a second mother to me. After a sojourn
+of several weeks with our relatives at St. Pierre Oleron (my good Aunt
+Claire and her two old unmarried daughters) we went alone, we three, to
+a fishing village upon the Long-Beach, which at that time was entirely
+off the line of travel. The Long-Beach is that portion of the
+Island commanding a view of the ocean over which the west winds blow
+ceaselessly. Upon this coast, which extends without a curve straight and
+seemingly limitless, with the majestic sweep of the desert of Sahara,
+the waves roll and break with a mighty noise. Here there are to be seen
+many uneven waste spaces; it is a region of sand where stunted trees and
+dwarfish evergreen oaks shelter themselves behind the dunes. A curious
+kind of wild flower, a pink and fragrant carnation, blooms there
+profusely all summer long. Two or three villages, composed of humble
+little cottages, whitewashed like the bungalows of Algeria, break the
+loneliness of this region. These homes have planted about them such
+flowers as can best resist the sea-winds. Dark skinned fishermen and
+their families, a hardy honest people, still very primitive at the time
+of which I write, live here; even sea-bathers had not found their way to
+these shores.
+
+In an old forgotten copy-book where my sister had written down (in a
+stilted manner) the impressions of that summer I find this description
+of our lodgings.
+
+"We dwell in the centre of the village, in the square, at the Mayor's
+house.
+
+"This house has two ells, which are spacious beyond measure.
+
+"Its dazzling whitewashed surfaces sparkle in the sun, its window
+shutters are fastened with large iron hooks and painted a dark green
+as is the custom here. The flower bed that is planted in the form of
+a wreath all around the house grows vigorously in the sand. The
+day-lilies, one surpassing the other in beauty, open their yellow, pink
+and red blossoms, and the mignonette beds which at noon-time are fully
+abloom waft on the air an odor that is sweet as the scent of orange
+blossoms.
+
+"Opposite us a little path hollowed out of the sand descends rapidly to
+the edge of the sea."
+
+My first really intimate acquaintance with the sea-wrack, crabs,
+sea-nettles, jelly-fish, and the thousand and one other small creatures
+that inhabit the ocean, dates from this visit to the Long-Beach.
+
+And during this same summer I fell in love for the first time--my
+beloved was a little village girl. But here, so that the story may be
+related more accurately, I will allow my sister, through the medium of
+the old copy-book, to speak again--I merely copy:
+
+"Dozens of the children (fishermen's boys and girls), tanned and brown
+and with little legs all bare, followed Pierre, or audaciously hurried
+before him, and from time to time turned and looked at him wonderingly
+with their beautiful dark eyes. At that time a little gentleman was
+a rare enough spectacle in that part of the country to be worth the
+trouble of running after.
+
+"Every day Pierre, accompanied by this crowd, would descend to the beach
+by means of the little footpath scooped out of the sand. There he would
+run and pick up the shells that, upon that coast, are so exquisitely
+beautiful. They are yellow, pink, purple and many other bright colors,
+and they have the most delicate and varied forms. Pierre admired them
+greatly, and the little ones who always followed him would silently
+offer him hands full.
+
+"Veronica was the most attentive of all. She was about his own age,
+perhaps a little younger, six or seven years of age. She had a sweet,
+dreamy little face, a rather pale complexion and lovely gray eyes. She
+was protected from the heat by a large white sunbonnet; a kichenote, as
+they call it in that part of the country, is a very old word, and means
+a large bonnet made of linen and cardboard, which projects over the
+face like the head-dress of a nun. Veronica would slip near Pierre,
+take possession of his hand, and keep it in hers. Thus they walked along
+contentedly without saying a word. They stopped from time to time to
+kiss each other. 'I wish to kiss you,' Veronica would say, and as she
+did so she embraced him tenderly with her little arms. Then after Pierre
+had allowed her the caress he would, in his turn, kiss her vehemently on
+her pretty, little, plump cheeks. . . ."
+
+* * * * *
+
+"Little Veronica used to run and seat herself upon our doorstep as soon
+as she was up; and there she remained like a faithful, loyal spaniel.
+As soon as Pierre woke he thought of her being there, and he would
+immediately get out of bed, have himself quickly washed, and stand
+quietly to have his blond curls combed out, and then run to find his
+little friend. They embraced each other and prattled of the events of
+the day before; sometimes Veronica, before coming to our house to wait
+for Pierre, made a trip to the seashore and gathered an apron full of
+the beautiful shells as a love offering to her sweetheart.
+
+"One day, at about the end of August, after a long reverie, during which
+Pierre had perhaps weighed and considered the difficult question of the
+social difference between them, he said; 'Veronica you and I must get
+married some day; I will ask permission of my parents when the time
+comes.'"
+
+Then my sister speaks of our departure:
+
+"Upon the 15th of September it was necessary for us to leave the
+village. Pierre had made a collection of shells, sea-weeds, star-fish
+and pebbles; he was insatiable and wished to carry all of them away with
+him, and with Veronica's aid he packed a great many into his boxes.
+
+"One morning a large carriage arrived at St. Pierre to take us away. The
+peace of the village was broken by the noise of the little bells and the
+cracking of the driver's whip. Pierre with the greatest care placed his
+own packets into the carriage and then we three quickly took our places.
+With eyes full of sadness Pierre gazed out of the carriage window
+towards the sandy path that led down to the beach--and at his little
+friend who stood there weeping."
+
+In conclusion I will copy word for word the reflection found at the end
+of the faded book which was written down by my sister during that same
+summer.
+
+"Then, and not for the first time, I fell into an uneasy reverie that
+had to do with Pierre, and I asked myself: 'What will become of the
+little boy? And what will become of his little friend whose figure we
+could still see outlined at the now far distant end of the road. How
+much despair does that little heart feel; how much anguish at being thus
+abandoned?'"
+
+"What will become of that boy?" Alas! what indeed! His whole life was to
+be similar to that summer of his childhood. To know the sorrow of
+many farewells; to desire to take with me a thousand trifles of no
+appreciable value, to hunger to have about me a world of beloved
+souvenirs,--but especially to say good bye to wild little creatures
+(loved perhaps just because they were ingenuous children of
+nature),--these things were to make up the sum of my life.
+
+The two or three days' journey home (broken into by a visit to our
+old aunts) seemed to me very nearly endless. My impatience to see and
+embrace mamma kept me from sleeping. I had not seen her for almost two
+months! My sister was the only person in the world who, at that time,
+could have made such a long separation from my mamma endurable to me.
+
+We reached the continent safely, and after a three-hours ride in the
+carriage that we found awaiting us at the boat-landing, we passed
+through the ramparts of our town. Ah! at last I saw my mother; I once
+more saw her dear face and sweet smile.--And now at this distant time I
+find that one of my clearest and most persistent memories is her beloved
+and still youthful face and her beautiful dark hair.
+
+When we arrived at the house I ran to visit my little lake and its
+grottoes, and I hurried to the arbor that grew against the old wall. But
+my eyes had become so accustomed to the immensity of the sandy beach
+and the ocean that all of these things appeared shrunken, diminished,
+walled-in and mean. The leaves were turning yellow, and although it was
+still warm there was a promise of early autumn in the air. With fear and
+dread I thought of the dull and cold days which would soon be upon us;
+and when, with a heavy heart, I began to unpack my boxes of sea-weed
+and shells, I was overcome with grief because I was not still upon the
+Island. I felt disquieted too about Veronica who would have to be there
+without me during the winter, and suddenly my eyes overflowed with tears
+at the thought that I might never again hold her dear little sun-burned
+hands in mine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+
+The time now arrived for me to begin regular lessons and to write
+exercises in copy-books, which I invariably smeared with ink--ah! what
+gloom and dreariness suddenly came into my life.
+
+I remember that I performed my tasks spiritlessly and sulkily, and that
+my lessons bored me inexpressibly. And since I wish to be very sincere,
+it is necessary for me to add that my teachers also were well-nigh
+intolerable to me.
+
+Alas! well do I remember the one who first taught me Latin (rosa, the
+rose; cornu, the horn; tonitru, the thunder). This tutor was very old
+and bent, and as sad of face as a rainy November day. He is dead now,
+the poor old fellow--sweet peace to his soul! He was exactly like that
+"Mr. Ratin" hit off in caricature so neatly by Topffer; he had all the
+marks, even to the wart with the three hairs, and fine wrinkles
+beyond number at the end of his old nose; to me his face was the
+personification of all that was hideous and disgusting.
+
+He arrived every day precisely at noon; and a chill would pass through
+me when I heard his knock which I would have recognized among a
+thousand.
+
+Always after his departure, I attempted to purify that part of my table
+where his elbow had rested by rubbing it hard with the napkin which
+I had taken clandestinely from the linen-closet. And the repulsion
+extended itself to the very books, already unattractive enough to me,
+which he touched; I even tore certain leaves out of them because I
+suspected that he had handled them a great deal.
+
+My books were always full of ink blots, always stained and covered with
+smeared sketches and pictures, which one draws idly when his attention
+wanders from his task. I who was usually so careful and proper a child
+had such a detestation for the books which I was obliged to learn
+from, that I abused them in the commonest fashion; altogether I was a
+miserable pupil. I found--and this is the astonishing part--that all
+my scruples of conscience deserted me when my teacher questioned me in
+regard to the time I had spent upon my lessons (I usually studied them
+in a mad hurry at the last moment); my aversion for study was the first
+thing that caused me to temporize with my conscience.
+
+In spite, however, of a pricking conscience, I still continued to
+give only a passing glance at my lessons at the very last moment. But
+generally "Mr. Ratin" would write "good" or "very good" upon the paper
+which it was my duty each evening to show to my father.
+
+I believe that if he, or the other professors who succeeded him, could
+have suspected the truth, could have guessed that out of their presence
+my mind did not dwell for more than five minutes a day upon what they
+had taught me, their honest heads would have split with indignation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+
+During the course of the winter which followed my visit to the
+Long-Beach a great change took place in our family--my brother departed
+for his first campaign.
+
+He was, as I have said, about fourteen years older than I. I had had
+very little time to become acquainted with him, to attach myself to him,
+for his preparation for his vocation made it necessary for him to be
+away from home a great deal. I scarcely ever went into his room where,
+scattered upon the table, there was an appalling number of large books.
+This room was pervaded with the strong odor of tobacco; and I dared not
+go near it for fear that I would meet his comrades, young officers,
+or students like himself. I had heard, also, that he was not always
+well-behaved, that sometimes he did not come in until very late at
+night, and that often my father had found it necessary to give him a
+serious talking to; secretly I greatly disapproved of his conduct.
+
+But his approaching departure strengthened my affection, and caused me
+extreme sorrow.
+
+He was going to Polynesia, to Tahiti, almost to the end of the world,
+and he expected to be away four years. To me that seemed an almost
+endless absence, for it represented half of my own age.
+
+I watched, with the greatest interest, the preparations that he made for
+his voyage. The iron-bound trunks were packed with care. He wrapped the
+gilt-embroidered uniform and his sword in a quantity of tissue paper,
+and put them away with the same care one bestows upon a mummy when it is
+relaid in its metal case. All of these things augmented the impression
+that I had of the distance and dangers of the long voyage about to be
+undertaken by my brother.
+
+A sort of melancholy rested upon every one in the house, which became
+deeper and more and more noticeable as the day for the separation
+drew near. At our meals we were more silent; advice from my father
+and assurances from my brother was the substance of most of the
+conversations, and I listened meditatively without saying a word.
+
+The day before my brother left he confided to my care--and I was greatly
+honored to have him do so--the many fragile little things that he had
+upon his mantel-piece; these he bade me guard faithfully until his
+return.
+
+He then made me a present of a handsome gilt edged, illustrated book
+entitled, "A Voyage in Polynesia." It was the only book that in my early
+childhood I had an affection for, and I constantly turned its pages
+with eager pleasure. In the front of it there was an engraving of a very
+pretty dark woman who, crowned with reeds, was sitting gracefully under
+a palm tree. Under this picture was printed: "Portrait of her Majesty,
+Pomare IV., Queen of Tahiti." Further over in the book there was a
+picture of two beautiful maidens, with naked shoulders and crowned
+heads, standing at the edge of the sea, and this was entitled: "Two
+Young Tahitian Girls upon the Beach."
+
+Upon the day of my brother's departure, at the last hour, the
+preparations being over, and the large trunks closed and locked, we
+gathered in the parlor as solemnly as if we had come together for a
+funeral. A chapter of the Bible was read and then we had family prayers.
+. . . Four years! and during that time the width of the earth between us
+and our loved one!
+
+I recall particularly my mother's face during the farewell scene; she
+was seated in an arm chair beside my brother. After the prayer she had
+upon her face an infinitely sweet, but wistful smile, and an expression
+of submissive trust; but suddenly an unexpected change came over her
+features, and in spite of her efforts at self-control her tears flowed.
+I had never before seen my mother weep, and it caused me the greatest
+anguish.
+
+The first few days after his departure I had a feeling of sadness, and I
+missed him greatly; often and often I went into his room, and the
+little treasures which he had confided to my care were as sacred as holy
+relics.
+
+Upon a map of the world I had my parents point out to me the route of
+his journey, a journey which would take about five months. To me his
+return belonged to an inconceivable and unreal future; and, most strange
+of all, what spoiled for me the pleasure of his home-coming, was that I
+at that time would be twelve or thirteen years of age--almost a big boy
+in fact.
+
+Unlike most other children,--especially unlike those of to-day--who are
+eager to become men and women as speedily as possible, I had a terror
+of growing up, which became more and more accentuated as I grew older. I
+argued about it to myself, and I wrote about it, and when any one asked
+me why I had such a feeling I answered, since I could not think of a
+better reason: "It seems to me that it will be very wearisome to be
+a man." I believe that it is an extremely singular state of mind, an
+altogether unique one perhaps, this shrinking away from life at its
+very beginning; I was not able to see a horizon before me: I could not
+picture my future to myself as so many can; before me there was nothing
+but impenetrable darkness, a great leaden curtain shut off my view.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+
+"Cakes, cakes, my good hot cakes!" Thus, in a plaintive voice, sang the
+old woman peddler who regularly, upon winter evenings, during the first
+ten or twelve years of my life, passed under our window.--When I think
+of those bygone days I hear again her insistent refrain.
+
+It is with the memory of Sundays that the song of the "good hot cakes"
+is most closely associated; for upon that evening, having no duties to
+perform in the way of lessons, I sat with my parents in the parlor upon
+the ground floor which overlooked the street; therefore, when almost
+upon the stroke of nine, the poor old woman passed along the sidewalk,
+and her sonorous chant broke into the stillness of the frosty night I
+was near enough to hear her distinctly.
+
+She presaged the coming of cold weather as swallows announce the advent
+of the spring. After a succession of cool autumnal days, the first time
+we heard her song we would say: "Well, we may conclude that winter is
+really here."
+
+This parlor where we sat together seemed a very immense room to me.
+It was simply and tastefully furnished and arranged: the walls and
+the woodwork were brown, decorated with strips of gold: the furniture,
+dating from the time of Louis Philippe, was upholstered in red velvet;
+the family portraits were in severe black and gold frames; in the centre
+of the table, in the place of honor, there was a large Bible that had
+been printed in the sixteenth century. This was a precious heirloom that
+had come down to us from our Huguenot ancestors who had, at that time,
+been persecuted for their faith. We had baskets and vases of flowers
+disposed about the room, a custom which then was not so usual as it is
+now.
+
+It was always a delicious moment for me when we left the dining-room and
+went into the parlor, for the latter room had an air of great peace and
+comfort; and when all the family were seated there in a circle, mother,
+grandmother and aunts, I began to skip about noisily in their midst
+from very joy at being surrounded by so many loved ones; and I waited
+impatiently for them to begin the little games which they were in
+the habit of playing with me early in the evening. Our neighbors, the
+D----'s, came to see us every Sunday; it was a time-honored custom in
+our two families, between whom there existed a friendship that had
+its inception in the country generations before our time; it was a
+friendship which had been handed down to us as a precious heritage. At
+about eight o'clock, when I recognized their ring, I jumped for joy,
+and I could not restrain myself from running to the street door to meet
+them, for Lucette, my dear friend, always came with her parents.
+
+Alas! how sad is my reverie when I think of the beloved and venerated
+forms of those who surrounded me upon those happy Sunday evenings;
+the majority of them have passed away, and their faces, when I seek to
+recall them, are dim and misty--some are altogether lost from memory.
+
+Then friends and relatives would begin to play, for the purpose of
+giving me pleasure, the little games of which I was so fond; they played
+"Marriage," "My Lady's Toilet," "The Horned Knight," and "The Lovely
+Shepherdess." Everybody took part in them, even the old people, and my
+grand aunt Bertha, the eldest of all, was irresistibly droll.
+
+The refrain became louder rapidly, for the singer trotted along with
+short, quick steps, and very soon she was under our window, where she
+kept repeating her song in a shrill, cracked voice.
+
+When they would allow me to do so, it was my greatest pleasure to run to
+the door, followed by an indulgent aunt, not so much for the purpose of
+buying the cakes, however, for they were coarse and unpalatable, as to
+stop the old woman and talk with her.
+
+The poor old peddler would approach with a courtesy, proud of being
+called, and standing with one foot upon the threshold she would present
+her basket for our inspection. Her neat dress was set off by the white
+linen sleeves that she always wore. While she uncovered her basket I
+would look longingly, like a caged wild-bird, far down the cold and
+deserted streets.
+
+I liked to breathe in great draughts of the icy air, to look hastily
+into the black night lying beyond the door, and then to run back into
+the warm and comfortable parlor,--meantime, the monotonous refrain grew
+fainter and fainter as it died away into the mean streets that lay close
+to the ramparts and the harbor. The old woman's route was always the
+same, and my thoughts followed her with a singular interest as long as
+the song continued.
+
+I felt a great pity for the poor old woman still wandering about in the
+cold night, while we were snug and warm at home; but mingled with that
+feeling there was another sentiment so confused and vague that I give
+it too much importance, even though I touch upon it never so lightly.
+It was this: I had a sort of restless curiosity to see those squalid
+streets through which the old peddler went so bravely, and to which I
+had never been taken. These streets, that I saw from the distance,
+were deserted in the day time, but there in the evening, from time
+immemorial, sailors made merry; sometimes the sound of their singing was
+so loud that we could hear it as we sat in our parlor.
+
+What could be going on there? What was the nature of that fun, the echo
+of whose din we heard so distinctly? How did they amuse themselves,
+these sailors, who had but newly come over the sea from distant
+countries where the sun was always hot? What life was careless and
+simple and free as theirs!
+
+My emotions lose their force when I endeavor to interpret them, and my
+words seem very inept. But I know that seeds of trouble, and seeds of
+hope (to develop how I could not guess) were at about this time planted
+in my little being. When, with my cakes in my hand, I re-entered the
+parlor where the family sat talking together quietly, I felt for a
+quick, almost inappreciable, moment suffocated and imprisoned.
+
+At half-past nine, because of me seldom later, tea was served, and with
+it we had thin slices of bread, spread with the most delicious butter,
+and cut with the care one gives to very few things in these days.
+
+Then at about eleven o'clock, after a reading from the Bible and a
+prayer, we retired.
+
+As I lay in my little white bed I was always more restless Sunday nights
+than at any other time. Immediately ahead of me there was the prospect
+of Mr. Ratin whom morning would surely bring, and he was always a most
+painful sight to me after a respite; also I was full of regret because
+Sunday was over, always over so quickly!--and I felt a great weariness
+when I thought of the many lessons it would be necessary for me to
+prepare before Sunday came again. Sometimes, as I lay there, I would
+hear the songs the sailors sung as they passed in the distant lands and
+noble ships; and a sort of dull and indefinite longing took possession
+of me and I felt as if I would like to be out of doors myself in search
+of pleasurable and exciting adventure. I hungered to be in the bracing
+wintry night air, or in one of those foreign lands where the sun beats
+down with tropical warmth; I yearned to be out and singing like them, as
+loud as possible, just for the joy of being alive.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+
+"And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven,
+saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the
+earth!"
+
+Besides reading the Bible with the family every evening, I read a
+chapter from it each morning before rising.
+
+My Bible was a very small one, with exceedingly fine print. Pressed
+between its pages were some flowers that I was very fond of; especially
+was I of the spray of pink larkspur, which had the power of bringing
+very distinctly before my mind's eye the stubble fields (gleux) of the
+Island of Oleron where I had gathered it.
+
+I do not know exactly how to explain the word gleux, but it means the
+stubble which remains after the grain is harvested, and those fields of
+short pale yellow stalks that the autumn sun dries and turns a
+bright golden. In these fields upon the Island, overrun by chirping
+grasshoppers, late corn-flowers and white and pink larkspur come up,
+grow very high, and blossom.
+
+And upon winter mornings, before beginning to read, I always looked at
+the spray of flowers which still retained its delicate color, and there
+appeared to me a vision of the Island, and I longed for the summer time
+and for the warm and sunny fields of Oleron.
+
+"And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven,
+saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth!
+
+"And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the
+earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit."
+
+When I read my Bible for myself, having then my choice of passages,
+I either selected that grand portion of Genesis wherein the light
+is separated from the darkness, or the visions and the marvels of
+Revelation. I was fascinated by its imaginative poetry, so splendid and
+yet so terrible, which has, in my opinion, never been equalled in any
+other book of mankind. . . . The beasts with seven heads, the signs in
+the heavens, the sound of the last trumpet were well-known terrors that
+haunted and enchanted my imagination.
+
+In a book, a relic of my Huguenot ancestors, printed in the last
+century, I had seen pictures of these things. It was a "History of the
+Bible," and the weird pictures illustrating the visions of the Book of
+Revelation, invariably, had dark backgrounds. My maternal grandmother
+kept this precious book, which she had brought from the Island, under
+lock and key in a cupboard in her room; and as it was still my habit to
+go there at the sad hour of dusk, it was then that I usually asked her
+to lend me the book, so that I might turn over its leaves as it lay upon
+her lap. In the dim twilight until it was too dark to see, I gazed at
+the multitude of winged angels who were flying rapidly under the curtain
+of blackness which presaged the end of the world. The heavens were
+darker than the earth, and in the midst of the great cloud masses, there
+was visible the simple and terrifying triangle that signified Jehovah.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+
+Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious
+fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without
+hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine. I saluted as
+old acquaintances two gods with hawk heads that were cut in profile
+upon a stone and placed at each end of a strangely depicted Zodiac,
+and although I saw the picture for the first time upon an overcast day,
+there came to me, and of that I am sure, a sudden impression of great
+heat given out by a pitiless sun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+
+
+During the winter following the departure of my brother, I passed many
+of my leisure hours in his room painting the pictures in the "Voyage to
+Polynesia" which he had given me. With great care I first colored the
+flowers and the groups of birds. After that I painted the men. When I
+came to color the two young Tahitian girls who were standing at the edge
+of the sea (the illustrator had been inspired to depict them as nymphs)
+I made them white, all white and pink like a pretty little doll--I
+thought them very beautiful done so.
+
+It was reserved for me to learn later than their color is different, and
+their charms quite otherwise.
+
+My ideas of beauty have changed a great deal since that time, and it
+would have astonished me very much if I had then been told what faces
+I was to find most charming in the strange course of my later life. But
+almost all children are under the dominion of some fancy which dies out
+when they become men and women.
+
+The majority of people, during the period of their innocence and youth,
+similarly admire the same type; sweet, regular features, and the fresh
+pink and white tints. Only at a later time does their estimate of what
+constitutes beauty vary, then it accords with the culture of their
+spirit, and especially does it follow in the wake of their developing
+intelligence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+
+
+I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which
+absorbed so much of my time. Just above my Aunt Bertha's room there was
+a tiny garret-chamber that I had taken possession of; the chief charm of
+the place was the window that opened to the west, and commanded a view
+of the ramparts and its old trees. The reddish spots in the distance,
+that broke the uniform green of the meadows, were herds of wandering
+oxen and cows. I had persuaded my mother to paper this attic room, and
+she had covered its walls with a pinkish chamois paper which is still
+there; she also put a what-not and some glass cases there. In these
+latter I placed my butterflies which I looked upon as rare specimens; I
+also arranged therein the birds'-nests that I had found in the woods of
+Limoise; the shells I had gathered upon the shores of the Island, and
+those others (brought from the colonies at an early time by unknown
+ancestors) that I had found in the garret at the bottom of old chests
+where they had lain for years and years, given over to dust and
+darkness.
+
+I spent many tranquil hours in this retreat contemplating the tropical
+mother-of-pearl shells, and trying to image to myself the strange coasts
+from which they had come.
+
+A good old great uncle of mine, who was very fond of me, encouraged me
+in these diversions. He was a physician, and in his youth he had lived
+for a long time upon the coast of Africa; he had a collection of natural
+history specimens almost as valuable and varied as any found in a city
+museum. His wonderful things captivated me: the rare and exquisite
+shells, amulets and wooden weapons that still retained their exotic
+odor, with which I became so surfeited later, and indescribably
+beautiful butterflies under glass enchanted me.
+
+He lived in our neighborhood and I visited him often. To get to his
+cabinets, it was necessary to go through his garden where thorn-apples
+and cacti grew abundantly, and where they kept a gray parrot, brought
+from Gaboon, whose vocabulary consisted of words learnt from the
+negroes.
+
+And when my old uncle spoke of Senegal, of Goree, and of Guinea,
+the music of these names intoxicated me, and conveyed to me vaguely
+something of the sad languor of the dark continent. My uncle predicted
+that I would become a great naturalist,--but he was as mistaken as were
+all those others who foretold my future; indeed he struck farther from
+the centre than any one else; he did not understand that my liking for
+natural history was no more than a temporary and erratic excursion of
+my unformed mind; he could not know that the cold glass and the formal,
+rigid arrangements of dead science had not power to hold me for long.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+
+
+In the meantime, alas! I had to spend many long and wearisome hours in
+going through the form of studying my lessons.
+
+Topffer, who is the only real poet of school-boys, that genus so
+misunderstood, divides us into three groups: first, those who are in
+boarding schools; second, those who do all their studying at home at a
+window which overlooks a gloomy courtyard containing a twisted old fig
+tree; third, those who also study at home in a bright little room whose
+window commands a view of the street.
+
+I belonged to that third class whom Topffer considers extraordinarily
+privileged, and as likely, in consequence, to grow up into happy men.
+My room was upon the first floor, and it opened into the street; it had
+white curtains, and its green paper was embellished with bouquets of
+white roses. Near the window was my work desk, and above it, upon a
+book-shelf, was my very much neglected library.
+
+In fine weather I always opened this window, but I kept my venetian
+blinds half-closed, so that I might look out without having my idleness
+seen, and reported by a meddlesome neighbor. Morning and evening I
+glanced to the end of the quiet street that stretched its sunny length
+between the white country houses and lost itself among the old trees
+growing beyond the ramparts. I could see from there the occasional
+passers-by, all well known to me, the neighborhood cats that prowled
+within doorways or upon house-tops, the swifts darting about in the warm
+air, and the swallows skimming along the dusty street. . . . Oh! how
+many hours have I spent at that window feeling like a caged sparrow, my
+spirit filled with vague reverie; and meantime my ink-blotted copy-book
+lay open before me, but no inspiration would come, and the composition
+that I was engaged upon got itself finished very laboriously,--often not
+at all.
+
+And before long I began to play tricks upon the pedestrians, a fatal
+result of my idleness over which I often felt remorseful.
+
+I am bound to confess that my great friend Lucette was usually a willing
+assistant in these pranks. Although now almost a young lady sixteen or
+seventeen years of age, she was at times almost as much of a child as I.
+"You must never tell any one!" she would say with an irrepressible smile
+of mischief in her merry eyes (but I may tell now after so many years
+have passed, now that the flowers of twenty summers have bloomed upon
+her grave).
+
+Our pranks consisted of taking cherry stems, plum stones and any sort
+of trash, and wrapping them neatly into white or pink paper parcels that
+looked very attractive to the eye; we then threw these bundles into the
+street and hid ourselves behind the shutters to see who picked them up.
+
+Sometimes we would write letters, impertinent or incoherent ones, with
+accompanying drawings to illustrate the text; these we addressed to the
+different eccentric people in our neighborhood, and, with the aid of
+a thread, we lowered them to the sidewalk at about the same time these
+persons were in the habit of passing. . . .
+
+Oh! how merrily we laughed as we composed these hodge-podges of style!
+With no one else have I ever laughed so heartily as with Lucette,--and
+we usually roared over things that no one except ourselves could
+possibly have considered funny. Over and above the bond of little
+brother and grown sister there was between us a sympathy springing from
+our appreciation of the ridiculous, and our notions of what constituted
+fun were in complete accord. She was the sprightliest person I ever
+knew, and sometimes a single word would start us to laughing at our own
+or our neighbors' expense, until our sides ached and we almost fell upon
+the floor.
+
+This part of my nature was not, I must confess, in harmony with the
+gloomy reveries evoked by the pictures of the Book of Revelation, and
+with my ascetic religious convictions. But I was already full of strange
+contradictions.
+
+Poor little Lucette or Lucon (Lucon was the masculine for Lucette, and
+I used to call her "My dear Lucon"); poor little Lucette was also one of
+my professors, but one who caused me neither fear nor disgust. Like "Mr.
+Ratin" she also kept a book wherein she would inscribe "good" or "very
+good," and I showed it to my parents every evening. Until now I have
+neglected to say that it had been one of her amusements to teach me to
+play upon the piano; she taught me by stealth so that I might
+surprise my parents by playing for them, upon the occasion of a family
+celebration, the "Little Swiss Boy" or the "Rocks of St. Malo." The
+result was she had been requested to go on with lessons that had had
+such a favorable beginning, and my musical education was entrusted to
+her until it came time for me to play the music of Chopin and Liszt.
+
+Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and
+faithfully.
+
+My sister taught me painting; I do not, however, remember when I
+commenced it, but it must have been very early in my life; it seems to
+me that there was never a time when I was not able, with my pencil or my
+brush, to express in some measure the odd fancies of my imaginations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+
+
+In my grandmother's room, at the bottom of the cupboard where she kept
+"The History of the Bible," with the terrible pictures illustrating the
+visions of Revelation, she had also several other precious relics. In
+particular there was an old silver-clasped psalm book. It was extremely
+tiny, like a toy-book, and in its day it must have been a marvel of the
+printer's skill. It had been made in miniature thus they told me, so
+that it could be easily hidden; at the time of the persecutions our
+ancestors had often carried it about with them, concealed in their
+clothing. There was also, in a paste-board box, a bundle of letters
+written on parchment and marked Leyden or Amsterdam. Those written
+between the years 1702 and 1710 were secured by a large wax seal stamped
+with a count's coronet.
+
+They were letters of our Huguenot ancestors, who, at the revocation of
+the Edict of Nantes, had quitted their country, their home and their
+dear ones, rather than abjure their faith. The letters had been written
+to an old grandfather, a man too aged to go the way of the exile, who
+was able, for some inexplicable reason, to remain unmolested in his
+retreat upon the Island of Oleron. The letters testified to the fact
+that the exiles had been submissive and respectful towards him to a
+degree unknown in our day; the wanderers wrote asking his advice or his
+consent before undertaking anything,--they even asked whether they might
+wear a certain wig which was fashionable in Amsterdam at that time. They
+spoke of their troubles, but without murmuring over them, with a truly
+Christian resignation; their goods had been confiscated; they were
+obliged to follow uncongenial trades in order to maintain themselves;
+and they hoped, they said, with the aid of God always to make enough to
+keep their children from starving.
+
+Together with the respect that these letters inspired, they had also
+the charm of age; it was a novel experience to enter into the life of
+a bygone time, to know the inmost thoughts of those who had lived a
+century and a half before me. And as I read them I was filled with
+indignation against the Roman Church and Papal Rome, sovereign during
+the many past centuries.--Surely it was she who was designated, in my
+opinion at any rate, in that wonderful prophecy contained in Revelation:
+"And the beast is a City, and its seven heads are Seven Hills on which
+the woman sitteth."
+
+My grandmother, always so austere and upright looking in her black
+clothes, a type of a Huguenot woman, had been fearful for her own safety
+during the Restoration, and although she never spoke of it, we felt that
+she must have very depressing memories of that time.
+
+And upon the Island, in the shade of a bit of woodland that was
+encircled by a wall, I had seen the place where slept those of my
+ancestors who had been excluded from the cemeteries because they had
+died in the Protestant faith.
+
+How could I be anything but faithful with such a past? And it is certain
+that had the Inquisition been revived in my childhood, I would have
+suffered martyrdom joyfully, like one filled to overflowing with the
+spirit of God.
+
+My faith was a faith that kept watch upon the theological errors of the
+time, and I did not know the resignation felt by my ancestors; in spite
+of my distaste for reading I often plunged into books of religious
+controversy; I knew by heart the many passages from the Fathers and the
+decisions of the first councils; I could have discussed the dogmas of
+the church like a doctor of divinity, and I considered my arguments
+against the papacy very shrewd.
+
+But notwithstanding my fervor a distaste for all of these religious
+things would often take possession of me; sometimes at church especially
+where the gray light fell upon me and chilled me I felt it most. The
+awful tediousness of some of the Sunday sermons; the emptiness of the
+prayers, written in advance and spoken with conventional unctuous voice,
+and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in
+their best, came to listen,--how early I divined its hollowness,--and
+how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment--oh!
+the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church
+disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, meant to be pretty without,
+however, meaning to be too much so; I especially recall certain little
+efforts at wall decoration which I held in the greatest abomination,
+and shuddered when I looked at. It was that disgust in little which
+I experienced in so great a degree when later I attended those Paris
+churches that strive so for elegance, where one is met at the door by
+ushers whose shoulders are tricked out with knots of ribbon. . . .
+Oh! for the congregation of Cevennes! Oh! for the preachers of the
+wilderness!
+
+Such little things as I have mentioned did not shake my faith which
+seemed as solid as a house built upon a rock; but doubtless they made
+the first imperceptible crevice through which, drop by drop, oozed the
+melting ice-cold water.
+
+Where I still knew true meditation, and felt the deep sweet peace one
+should feel in the house of God was in an old church in the village of
+St. Pierre Oleron; my great grandfather Samuel had, at the time of
+the persecutions, worshipped and prayed there, and my mother had also
+attended it during her girlhood days. . . . I also loved those little
+country churches to which we sometimes went on Sunday in the summer
+time: they were generally old and had simple whitewashed walls. They
+were built any where and every where, in a corner of a wheat field with
+wild flowers growing all about them; or in more retired places, in the
+centre of some enclosure at the far end of an avenue of old trees. The
+Catholics have nothing, in my opinion, which surpasses in religious
+charm these humble little sanctuaries of our Protestant ancestors--not
+even do their most exquisite stone chapels hidden away in the depth
+of the Breton woods, that at a later time I learned to admire so much,
+touch me so deeply.
+
+I still held fast to my determination to become a minister; it still
+seemed to me that that was my duty. I had pledged myself, in my prayers
+I had given my word to God. How could I therefore break my vow?
+
+But when my young mind busied itself with thoughts of the future, more
+and more veiled from me by an impenetrable darkness, my preference was
+for a church which should be a little isolated from the noisy world, for
+one where the faith of my congregation should ever remain simple, for
+one receiving its consecration from a long past of prayers and sincerest
+worship.
+
+It would be in the Island of Oleron perhaps!
+
+Yes; there, surrounded upon every side by the memories of my Huguenot
+ancestors, I could look forward without dread, indeed with much
+contentment, to a life dedicated to the service of the Lord.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+
+
+My brother had arrived at the Delightful Island. His first letter dated
+from there was a very long one, it was written on thin paper that had
+been stained a light yellow by the sea, for it had been upon its way
+four months.
+
+It was a great event in our family, and I still recall that as my father
+and mother broke its seal, I sprang joyously up the stairs, two steps
+at a time, in my haste to reach the second floor and call my grandmother
+and aunts from their rooms.
+
+Inside the plump-feeling envelope, which was covered over with South
+American stamps, there was a note for me, and enclosed in this I found
+a pressed flower, a sort of five-petalled star which, though somewhat
+faded, was still pink. The flower, my brother wrote, was from a shrub
+that had taken root and blossomed beside his window, almost within his
+Tahitian hut, which was actually invaded by the luxuriant vegetation
+of the region. Oh! with what deep emotion;--with what avidity, if I may
+express it thus, did I gaze at and touch the periwinkle which was
+almost a fresh and living part of that unknown and distant land, of that
+voluptuous nature.
+
+Then I pressed it again with so much care that I possess it intact to
+this day.
+
+And after many years, when I made a pilgrimage to the humble dwelling in
+which my brother lived during his stay in Tahiti, I saw that the shady
+garden surrounding it was rosy with these periwinkles; they had even
+pushed their way over the threshold of the door to blossom within the
+deserted cabin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+
+
+After my ninth birthday my parents, for a time, spoke of putting me into
+boarding-school, so that I might become habituated to the harder ways
+of life, and since the matter was talked over by all the members of the
+family, I went about for several days feeling as if I were on the eve
+of being sent to prison, for I imagined that a boarding-school had high
+walls and windows guarded by iron bars.
+
+But, upon reflection, they considered that I was too frail and delicate
+a human plant to be thrown in contact with those others of my kind
+who, in all probability, would play roughly, and have bad manners; they
+concluded, therefore, to keep me at home a little longer.
+
+At any rate I was delivered from "Mr. Ratin." The old professor, rotund
+of figure and kind of manner, who succeeded him, was less distasteful to
+me, but I made just as little progress under his care. In the afternoon,
+at about the time for his arrival, I would hastily begin to prepare my
+lessons. I was then usually to be found at my window, hidden behind the
+venetian blinds, with my book open at the page containing the lesson;
+and when I saw him come into view at the turning near the bottom of the
+street I commenced to study it.
+
+And generally by the time he arrived I knew enough to receive, if not to
+merit, a "pretty good," a mark over which I did not grumble.
+
+I had also my English professor who came to me every morning,--and
+whom I nicknamed Aristogiton (I do not now recall why). Following the
+Robertson method, he had me paraphrase the history of Sultan Mahmoud.
+Outside of that, the only thing that I am sure of is that I accomplished
+nothing, absolutely nothing, less than nothing; but he had the
+good taste not to growl at me, and in consequence I have an almost
+affectionate remembrance of him.
+
+During the extreme heat of the summer days it was my custom to study in
+the yard; I took my ink-stained copy and lesson books and spread them
+upon a table that stood in the summer house made shady by the vines and
+honeysuckles that grew over it. And when I was nicely settled there
+I felt that I might idle to my heart's content. From behind the
+lattice-work, green with trellised vines, I kept a lookout in order
+to see any danger that threatened in the distance. . . . I was always
+careful to bring with me to this retreat a quantity of cherries and
+grapes, whichever happened to be in season, and truly I could have
+passed there hours of the most delicious reverie but for the remorse
+that tormented me almost every moment, a remorse born of the fact that I
+was not busying myself with my lessons.
+
+Through the foliage I saw, close to me, the cool-looking pond with its
+tiny grottoes which, since my brother's departure, I almost worshipped.
+The little fountain in the centre stirred the waters and made the
+sunlight that fell on its surface dance joyously; and the sun's rays
+pierced the green verdure surrounding me--I seemed to be in the midst of
+luminous water that quivered all about me with a ceaseless motion.
+
+My arbor was a shady little retreat that gave me a complete illusion of
+country; from the far side of the old wall came the song of the tropical
+birds belonging to Antoinette's mother, and I heard the rollicking
+warble and twitter of the swallows perched on the house-top, and the
+chirp of the common sparrows as they flew about among the trees in the
+garden.
+
+Sometimes I would throw myself face-upward full length upon the green
+bench that was there, and through the tasselled honeysuckle I had a view
+of the white clouds as they sailed across the blue of the sky. There,
+too, I was initiated into the habits of the mosquitos who all day long
+poised themselves tremblingly, by means of their long legs, upon the
+leaves. And often I concentrated all my attention upon the old wall
+where the insects acted out their tragical drama: the cunning spider
+would come suddenly from his nook and ensnare in his web the heedless
+little insects,--with the aid of a straw, I was usually able to deliver
+them from their peril.
+
+I have forgotten to mention that I had, for companion, an old cat called
+Suprematie, who had been my faithful and beloved friend since infancy.
+
+Suprematie knew at what hour he would find me there, and he used to slip
+in quietly upon the tips of his velvet paws; he never stretched himself
+beside me without first looking at me questioningly.
+
+The poor creature was very homely; he was marked queerly upon only one
+side of his body; moreover, in a cruel accident he had twisted his
+tail, and it hung down at a right angle. He was the subject of Lucette's
+continual mockery, for she had a lovely Angora cat that had usurped
+Suprematie's place in her affections. It was my habit to run out to see
+her when she came to inquire after the members of my family; she rarely
+failed to add, with a funny air of concern, which made me burst out
+laughing in spite of myself: "And your horror of a cat, is he in good
+health, my dear?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+
+
+During all this time my museum made great progress, and it soon became
+necessary for me to have some new shelves put up.
+
+My great uncle continued to take a very deep interest in my taste for
+natural history, and among his shells he found a number of duplicates,
+and these he presented to me. With indefatigable patience he taught me
+the scientific classifications of Cuvier, Linne, Lamarck or Bruguieres,
+and I was astonished at the attention with which I listened to him.
+
+In a very old little desk, that was a part of the furniture of my
+museum, I had a copy-book into which I copied, from uncle's notes, and
+numbered with the greatest care, the name of the species, genus, family
+and class of each shell,--also the place of its origin. And there by the
+dim light that fell upon the desk, in the silence of that little retreat
+so high above the street, surrounded with objects what had come from
+distant corners of the earth and from the depths of the sea, when
+my mind wandered, and I became fatigued because of the mysterious
+differences in the forms of animals, and because of the infinite variety
+of shells, with what emotion I wrote down in my book, opposite the name
+of a Spirifer or a Terebratula, such enchanting words as these: "Eastern
+coast of Africa," "coast of Guinea," "Indian Ocean."
+
+I recall that in this same museum I experienced, one afternoon in March,
+a peculiar feeling indicative of my tendency towards reaction, that
+later, at certain periods of self-abandonment, caused me to seek the
+rough and uncouth society of sailors, and made me revel in noise and
+change and gayety.
+
+It was Mardi-Gras time. At sundown I had gone out with my father to see
+the masqueraders who were in the streets; and having returned rather
+early I went immediately to my attic-room to classify some shells. But
+the noise of the revellers and the clashing of their tambourines
+reached even to the retreat where I was occupying myself with scientific
+matters, and the sounds awakened in me a feeling of inexpressible
+sadness. It was the same emotion, greatly intensified, that I had when
+I listened, of winter evenings, to the old cake vendor, and heard her
+voice die away into those far-off squalid streets near the harbor. I
+experienced an unexpected anguish very difficult to define in words. I
+had a vague impression, which was the cause of my suffering, that I
+was imprisoned; and for the moment, I thought that my liking for dry
+classifications and nature study shut me away from the little boys of
+every age who were in the streets below mingling with the sailors, more
+childish than they, who tricked out in dreadful masks ran and frollicked
+and sang coarse songs. It goes without saying that I had no desire to
+be one of them; the very idea of jostling against them filled me with
+distaste, and I disdained their rude sport. And I sincerely felt that
+it was better for me to be where I was, occupied with putting the
+many-colored family of the Purpura and the twenty-three varieties of the
+Gastropoda in order.
+
+But nevertheless the gay and merry people in the street troubled me
+strangely. And, as was usual with me when I felt distressed, I went down
+to look for my mother for the purpose of begging her to come up to keep
+me company. Astonished at my request (for I scarcely ever asked any one
+into my den), astonished especially by my anxious manner, she said with
+an air of pleasantry that it was silly for a boy of ten to be afraid
+to stay alone; but she consented to return with me, and when there
+she seated herself close to me and occupied herself with a piece of
+embroidery. Oh! how reassuring was her sweet and darling presence! I
+returned to my task without concerning myself further about the noise of
+the maskers, and as I worked I glanced up now and again to look at her
+beautiful profile cut in silhouette, because of the darkness without,
+upon my tiny window pane.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+
+
+I am surprised that I cannot recall whether my desire to become a
+minister transformed itself into a wish to lead the more militant life
+of missionary, by a slow process or suddenly.
+
+It seems to me that the change must have come at a very early period.
+For a long time I had taken an interest in Protestant missions,
+especially in those established in Southern Africa, among the Bassoutos.
+During my childhood we subscribed for the "Messenger," a monthly journal
+that had for frontispiece an interesting picture which, very early in my
+life, made a forcible impression upon me.
+
+This picture held a higher place in my regard than those of which I have
+already spoken, but by no means because of its execution, its color or
+background. It represented an impossible pine tree growing at the edge
+of a sea, behind which a resplendent sun was setting, and, at the foot
+of the tree, there was a young savage who was watching the approach of
+a ship, from a distant point upon the horizon, that was bringing to him
+the glad tidings of Salvation.
+
+Early in my life, when from the warm depths of my soft and downy nest,
+I looked out upon a yet formless world, that picture evoked many dreams;
+later when I was more capable of appreciating the extreme crudity of the
+design, that huge sun, half-engulfed in the sea, and that tiny mission
+boat sailing towards the unknown shores still had a very great charm for
+me.
+
+Now when they questioned me I replied: "I expect to be a missionary."
+But I spoke in a low voice, in the voice of one not sure of himself, and
+I felt that they no longer believed in my asseverations. Even my mother,
+when she heard my response, smiled sadly.
+
+Doubtless my answer exceeded what she expected from my faith;--probably
+she said to herself that it was never to be; no doubt she thought that I
+would become something very different, in all probability something less
+desirable, that it was impossible at this time to foresee.
+
+This determination of mine to become a missionary seemed to solve my
+every problem. It would mean long voyages and an adventurous, perilous
+life,--but journeys would be undertaken in the service of the Lord,
+and the dangers endured for His blessed cause. That solution brought me
+great tranquillity for a long time.
+
+After having thus won peace for my religious conscience, I feared
+to dwell upon the thought lest it should disclose some unexpected
+weaknesses. But still the chill waters of commonplace sermons, with
+their endless repetitions and stock phrases, continued to flow over and
+wash away my early faith. My shrinking from life increased rather than
+diminished. There seemed to hang between me and the years to come a
+great curtain whose heavy folds it was impossible for me to lift.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+
+
+In preceding chapters I have not said much about that Limoise which
+was the scene of my initiation into nature and its wonders. My entire
+childhood is intimately connected with that little corner of the world,
+with its ancient forests of oak trees, and its rocky moorlands covered
+here and there with a carpet of wild thyme and heather.
+
+For ten or twelve glorious summers I went there to spend my Thursday
+holidays, and I dreamed of it during the dreary intervening days of
+study.
+
+In May our friends the D-----s and Lucette went to their country home
+and remained until vintage time, usually until after the first October
+frost,--and regularly every Wednesday evening I was taken there.
+
+Nothing in my estimation was so delightful as that journey to Limoise.
+We scarcely ever went in a carriage, for it was not more than three and
+a half miles distant; to me, however, it seemed very far, almost lost in
+the woods. It lay toward the south, in the direction of those distant,
+sunny lands I loved to think of. (I would have found it less charming
+had it been towards the north.)
+
+Every Wednesday evening, at sunset, the hour therefore varying with the
+month, I left home accompanied by Lucette's elder brother, a grown boy
+of eighteen or twenty, who seemed to me a man of mature age. As far as
+I was able I tried to keep pace with him, and, in consequence, I was
+obliged to go more rapidly than when I walked with my father and sister;
+we went through the quiet streets lying near the ramparts, and passed
+the sailors' old barracks, the sounds of whose bugles and drums reached
+as far as my attic museum when the south wind blew; then we passed
+through the fortifications by the most ancient of its gray gates,--a
+gate almost abandoned, and used now principally by peasants with flocks
+of sheep and droves of cattle,--and finally we arrived at the road that
+led to the river.
+
+A mile and a half of straight road stretched before us, and this path
+lay between stunted old trees yellow with lichens whose branches were
+blown to the left by the force of the sea-winds that almost constantly
+came from the west, sweeping over the broad and level meadows that lay
+between us and the ocean.
+
+To those who have a conventionalized idea of country beauty, and to whom
+a charming landscape means a river winding its way between poplars, or a
+mountain crowned by an old castle, this level road would look very ugly.
+
+But I found it exquisite in spite of its straight lines. Upon the left
+there was nothing to be seen but grassy meadow land over which herds of
+cattle strayed. And before us, in the distance, something that resembled
+a line of ramparts shut in the plains sadly: it was the edge of a rocky
+plateau at whose base flowed the river. The far bank of this river was
+higher than the side that we were on, and was, in some respects, of
+a different character, but for the most part it was as flat and
+monotonous. And it is just this sameness that has so much charm for
+me, an attraction appreciated seemingly by few others. The great level
+plains with their calm and tranquil straight lines are deeply and
+profoundly inspiring.
+
+There is nothing in our vicinity that I love any better than the old
+road; perhaps I have an affection for it because during my school-boy
+days I built so many castles-in-Spain upon those flat plains where, from
+time to time, I find them again. It is one of the few spots that has not
+been disfigured by factories, docks and railways. It seems a spot that
+belongs peculiarly to me, and certainly no one has the power to contest
+my spiritual right to it.
+
+The sum of the charm of the sensuous world dwells in us, is an emanation
+from ourselves; it is we who diffuse it, each person for himself
+according to his power, and we have it back again in the measure of our
+out-giving. But I did not comprehend early enough the deep meaning of
+this well-known truth. . . . During my childhood and youth the charm
+seemed to reside in the thing itself, to have its habitation in the old
+walls and the honeysuckle of my garden; I thought it lay along the sandy
+shores of the Island and upon the grassy meadows and rocky moorland
+about me. Later on, in pouring out my admiration every where, as I did,
+I drew too heavily upon the well-spring--I exhausted it at the source.
+And, alas! I find the land of my childhood, to which I will no doubt
+return to die, changed and shrunken, and only for a moment, in certain
+spots, am I able to recreate the illusions I have lost;--there I am for
+the most part weighed down by the crushing memories of bygone
+days. . . .
+
+As I was saying before my digression, every Wednesday evening I walked
+with a light and joyous step along the road that led towards those
+distant rocks lying at the boundary of the plains, I went gayly
+towards that region of oak trees and mossy stones in which Limoise was
+situated,--my imagination greatly magnified it in those days.
+
+The river we had to cross was at the end of the straight avenue
+of lichened trees so harried by the west winds. The river was very
+changeable, being subject to the tides and to all the moods of the
+neighboring ocean. We crossed in a ferry-boat or a yawl, always having
+for our oarsmen old sailors with bleached beards and sunburnt faces whom
+we had known from earliest childhood.
+
+When we reached the other bank, the rocky one, I always had a curious
+optical illusion: it seemed to me that the town from which we had come,
+and whose gray ramparts we still could see, suddenly drew very far
+away from us, for in my young head distances exaggerated themselves
+strangely. Upon this side all was different, the soil, the grass, the
+wild flowers and even the butterflies that hovered over them; nothing
+here was like those approaches to our town in whose fens and meadows I
+took my daily walk. And the differences, which perhaps others would
+not have noticed, thrilled and charmed me, for it had been my habit to
+spend, perhaps to waste, my time in observing the infinitesimally small
+things in nature, and I had often lost myself in contemplation of the
+lowliest mosses. Even the twilights of these Wednesday evenings had
+about them something distinctive and peculiar which I cannot express;
+generally we reached the far shore just as the sun was setting, and we
+watched it, from the height of the lonely plateau, disappear behind the
+tall meadow-grass through which we had but newly come, and as it sunk
+its great ruddy dish seemed uncommonly large.
+
+After crossing the river we turned off the high-road and took an
+unfrequented way that led through a region called "Chaumes," a very
+beautiful place at that time but horribly profaned to-day.
+
+"Chaumes" lay at the entrance of a village whose ancient church we saw
+in the distance. As it was public property it had kept intact its native
+wildness. This "Chaumes" was a sort of table-land composed of a single
+stone, and this rock, which undulated slightly, was covered with a
+carpet of short, dry fragrant plants that snapped under our feet; and a
+whole world of tiny gayly-colored butterflies and tinier moths fluttered
+among the rare and delicate flowers growing there.
+
+Sometimes we passed a flock of sheep guarded by a shepherd much more
+countrified looking and tanned than those seen in the meadows about our
+town. Lonely and sun-scorched, Chaumes seemed to me the very threshold
+of Limoise: it had its very odor, the mingled scent of wild thyme and
+sweet marjoram.
+
+At the end of the rocky moor was the hamlet of Frelin. I love this
+name of Frelin, for I think of it as being derived from those large
+and fierce hornets (frelons) that build their nests in the heart of a
+certain species of oak tree found in the forests of Limoise; to get rid
+of these pests it is necessary, in the springtime, to build great fires
+around the infested trees. This hamlet was composed of three or four
+cottages. They were all low, as is the custom of our country, and they
+were old, very old and gray; above the little rounded doorways were
+half-effaced ornamental Gothic scrolls and blazonments. I scarcely ever
+saw them except at dusk, as twilight was falling, and the hour and
+the quaint little houses themselves awoke in me an appreciation of the
+mystery of their past; above all these humble dwellings attested to the
+antiquity of this rocky ground, so much older than the meadows of our
+town which had been won from the sea, and where nothing that dates
+before the time to Louis XIV is to be found.
+
+As soon as we left Frelin I commenced to look eagerly along the path
+ahead of me, for after that we usually spied Lucette, either afoot or
+in a carriage, coming to meet us. As soon as I caught a glimpse of her I
+would run ahead to embrace her.
+
+On our way through the village we passed the tiny church, a wonder of
+the twelfth century, built in the rarest and most ancient Romanesque
+style;--and then as the shadows of evening deepened we saw, in the
+semi-darkness before us, something that had the form of tall dark
+legions: it was the forest of Limoise, composed almost wholly of
+evergreen oaks, whose foliage is very dark and sombre. We then came into
+the road leading directly to the house; on our way we passed the well
+where the patient, thirsty cattle awaited their turn to drink. And
+finally we opened the little old gate, and traversed the first grassy
+courtyard which the shadowing trees, a century old, plunged into almost
+total darkness.
+
+The house lay between this courtyard and a large uncultivated garden
+that extended to the edge of the oak forest. As we entered the ancient
+dwelling, with its whitewashed walls and old-fashioned wainscoting, I
+always looked eagerly for my butterfly-net that was usually to be found
+hanging in the place where I had left it, ready for the next day's
+chase.
+
+After dinner it was our custom to go to the foot of the garden, and
+there we sat in an arbor that was built against the old wall encircling
+the yard,--this bower faced away from the unfriendly darkness of the
+woods where the owls hooted. And while we were seated in the beautiful,
+mild, star-bespangled night, suddenly upon the air, musical with
+the chirping of myriad crickets, there was heard the tolling of a
+bell,--heard very clearly by us although it came from afar off,--it was
+the church bell in the village announcing the evening service.
+
+Oh! the vesper bell of Enchillais heard in that beautiful garden long
+ago! Oh! the sound of that bell, a little cracked but still silvery,
+like the once beautiful voices of very old people which still retain
+something of their sweetness. What charm of past times, and half sad
+meditations of peaceful death, were awakened by that music which spread
+itself into the limpid darkness of the surrounding country! And we heard
+the bell chiming for a long time, but its sound reached us fitfully;
+one while it seemed to be near, and then again it seemed far away, as it
+obeyed the will of the soft night wind that was stirring. I bethought
+me of all those who, on their lonely farms, were listening to it; I
+bethought me, too, of all the unpeopled places round about where it
+would be heard by no one, and a shudder passed through me at the thought
+of the near-by forest, where the sweet vibrations of the bell would die.
+
+The municipal council, composed of very superior spirits, after having
+first put its everlasting tri-colored flag upon the steeple of the
+little Roman Catholic Church, then suppressed its vesper bell. Its day
+is done; and we shall never again, upon summer evenings, hear that call
+to prayers.
+
+Going to bed there was always a very enlivening proceeding, especially
+when there was the prospect of a whole Thursday of play before me. I
+would, I am sure, have been very much afraid in the guest chamber,
+which was on the ground floor of the great, isolated house; but until my
+twelfth year I slept on the floor above, in the spacious room occupied
+by Lucette's mother;--with the aid of screens they had made for me a
+little room of my own. In this retreat there was a book-case with glass
+doors that belonged to the time of Louis XIV; this was filled with
+treatises, a century old, upon navigation, and with sailors' log-books
+that had not been opened for a hundred years. Tiny, scarce visible
+butterflies, that entered by the open windows, were to be found here all
+summer long, sleeping with extended wings upon the whitewashed walls.
+And often the most exciting incident of the day happened just as I was
+falling asleep; sometimes then an unwelcome bat found his way into the
+room and circled wildly about the lighted candles; or an enormous moth
+buzzed in and we would chase him with a cobweb-broom. Or again a storm
+descended upon us and the great trees lashed their branches against the
+house, and the old shutters slammed back and forth, and we waked with a
+start.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+
+
+Now comes the apparition of another little friend who stood very high in
+my childish favor. As nearly as I can remember I became acquainted with
+her when I was eleven; Antoinette had left the country; Veronica was
+forgotten.
+
+Her name was Jeanne, and she was the youngest member of a naval
+officer's family, that like the D-----s had been bound up in friendship
+with ours for more than a century. As she was two or three years younger
+than I, I had at first taken but little notice of her--probably I
+thought her too babyish.
+
+Her face was as droll as a little kitten's, and it was impossible to
+tell from the pinched up features whether she would become pretty or
+ugly; but she had a certain grace, and when she was eight or nine years
+old her face became very sweet and charming. She was very roguish,
+and as friendly as I was diffident; and as she darted about in those
+childish dances we sometimes had in the evenings, and from which I
+held myself aloof, she seemed to me the extreme of worldly elegance and
+coquetry.
+
+But in spite of the great intimacy between our families, it was evident
+that her parents looked upon our friendship with disfavor, they probably
+thought it unseemly that she had chosen a boy for her companion. This
+knowledge caused me much suffering, and the impressions of my childhood
+were so vivid and persistent that I did not, until many years had
+passed, until I became quite a grown youth, pardon her father and mother
+the humiliation they had caused me.
+
+It therefore resulted that my desire to play with her increased greatly.
+And she, knowing this, was as perverse as a princess in a fairy tale;
+she laughed mercilessly at my timid ways, at my awkward manners and my
+ungraceful fashion of entering the parlor; there was kept up between us
+a constant interchange of playful raillery, an oral stream of inimitable
+pleasantry.
+
+When I was invited to spend the day with her the prospect gave me the
+greatest joy, but the aftertaste of the visit was generally bitter, for
+usually I committed some mortifying blunder in that family where I felt
+myself so misunderstood. Every time I wished to have Jeanne at my house
+for dinner it was necessary for my aunt Bertha, who was a person of
+authority in the eyes of Jeanne's parents, to arrange the matter for me.
+
+Upon one occasion when little Jeanne returned from Paris she related
+to me the story of the "Donkey's Skin," which she had seen acted at the
+theatre in the city.
+
+Her time so spent was not lost, for the "Donkey's Skin" was destined to
+occupy a prominent place in my life during the next four or five years,
+the hours that I wasted upon it were more preciously squandered than
+were any others in my life.
+
+Together we conceived the idea of mounting the piece upon the stage
+of my miniature theatre. That play of the "Donkey's Skin" brought us
+together very often. And little by little the project assumed gigantic
+proportions; it grew as the months sped, and amused us in ever
+increasing measure; indeed, in proportion to the degree of perfection
+to which we were able to bring our conception did we enjoy it. We
+manufactured fantastic decorations; we dressed, so that they might take
+part in the processions, innumerable little dolls. It will be necessary
+for me to speak often of that fairy spectacle which was one of the
+important things of my childhood.
+
+And even after Jeanne tired of it I worked over it alone, and I fairly
+outdid myself by undertaking enterprises that seemed grand to me, such,
+for instance, as my efforts to represent moonlight, great conflagrations
+and storms. I also made marvellous palaces and gardens wonderful as
+Aladdin's. All my dreams of enchanted regions, of strange tropical
+luxuries, which I later found in the distant corners of the world, took
+form in the little play of the "Donkey's Skin." Leaving out the mystical
+experiences at the commencement of my life, I can affirm that almost all
+my fancies had their essay on that tiny stage. I was nearly fifteen when
+the last decorations, unfinished ones, were laid away forever in the
+cardboard box that served them for a peaceful tomb.
+
+And since I have anticipated their future I will say in conclusion
+that in later years, when Jeanne had grown into a beautiful woman, upon
+numerous occasions we have planned to open the box where our little
+dolls are sleeping. But we live our life so rapidly that we seem never
+to find the time, nor will we, I fear, ever find it.
+
+Later our children may,--or who can tell, perhaps our grandchildren!
+Upon some future day, when we are forgotten, our unknown descendants
+in ferreting to the bottom of old cupboards will be astonished to
+find there numberless little creatures, nymphs, fairies and genii, all
+dressed by our hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI.
+
+
+
+It is said that many children who live in the central provinces, away
+from the ocean, have a great longing to see it. I who had never been
+away from the monotonous country surrounding us looked forward eagerly
+to seeing the mountains.
+
+I tried to imagine them; I had seen pictures of several, and I had even
+painted them for the "Donkey's Skin." My sister, when she visited Lake
+Lucerne, sent me a description of the mountains, and wrote me long
+letters about them, such as are seldom addressed to a child of my age.
+And my ideas were further extended by some photographs of glaciers that
+my sister brought me for my magic-lantern. I desired with all my heart
+to see the mountains themselves.
+
+One day, as if in answer to my wish, there came a letter that created
+quite a stir in our house. It was from a first cousin of my father, who
+had at one time regarded my father with a brotherly love, but for thirty
+years, for some reason unknown to me, this cousin had not written or
+given any sign of life.
+
+At the time of my birth, all talk of him had ceased in our family, and I
+was ignorant of his existence. And now he wrote and begged that the
+old bond might be renewed; he was living, he said, in a little southern
+village in the heart of the Swiss Mountains. He announced that he had
+two sons and a daughter about the age of my brother and sister. His
+letter was very affectionate, and my father responded to it in like
+manner and told his cousin all about us, his three children.
+
+The correspondence having continued, it was arranged that I should spend
+my next vacation with my relatives; my sister was to take me there and
+play the part of mother as she had done during our visit to the Island.
+
+The south, the mountains, this sudden extension of my horizon, the
+cousins who seemed literally to have fallen from the sky, became the
+subject of my constant reveries until the month of August, the time set
+for our departure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII.
+
+
+Little Jeanne had come over to spend the day at our house; it was at the
+end of May during that spring in which my expectations were so great--I
+was twelve years old at the time. All the afternoon we rehearsed with
+our tiny jointed china dolls, and painted scenery, we had in fact been
+busy with the "Donkey's Skin,"--but with a revised and grand version of
+it, and we had about us a great confusion of paints, brushes, pieces of
+cardboard, gilt paper and bits of gauze. When it came time for us to go
+down into the dining-room we stored our precious work away in a large
+box that was consecrated to it from that day forth--the box was a new
+one made of pine, and it had a penetrating, resinous odor.
+
+After our dinner, at dusk, we were taken out for a walk. But, to my
+surprise and sorrow, we found it chilly and the sky was overcast, and
+every where there was a sort of mist that recalled winter to my mind.
+Instead of going beyond the town, to the places usually frequented by
+pedestrians, we went towards the Marine Garden, a much prettier and more
+suitable walk, but one usually deserted after sunset.
+
+We went down the long straight street without meeting any one; as we
+drew near the "Chapel of the Orphans" we heard those within chanting a
+psalm. When that was finished a procession of little girls filed out.
+They were dressed in white, and they looked very cold in their spring
+muslins. After making a circuit of the lonely quarter, chanting
+meanwhile a melancholy hymn, they noiselessly re-entered the chapel.
+There was no one in the street to see them save ourselves, and the
+thought came to me that neither was there any one in the gray heavens
+above to see them; the overcast sky seemed as lonely as the solitary
+street. That little band of orphaned children intensified my feeling
+of sorrow and added to the disenchantment of the May night, and I had a
+consciousness of the vanity of prayer, of the emptiness of all things.
+
+In the Marine Garden my sadness increased. It was extremely cold, and we
+shivered in our light spring wraps. There was not a single promenader
+to be seen. The large chestnut trees all abloom and the foliage, in
+the glory of its tender hue, formed a feathery green and white
+avenue--emptiness was here too; all of this intertwined magnificence of
+branch and flower, seen of no one, unfolded itself to the indifferent
+sky that stretched above it cold and gray. And in the long flower beds
+there was a profusion of roses, peonies and lilies that seemed also to
+have mistaken the season, for they appeared to shiver, as we did, in the
+chill twilight.
+
+I have found that the melancholy one sometimes feels in the springtime
+usually transcends that felt in autumn, for the reason, doubtless, that
+the former is so out of harmony with the promise of the season.
+
+The demoralized state into which I was thrown by everything about me
+gave me a longing to play a boyish trick upon Jeanne. There came to me
+a desire (one that I frequently felt) to have some sort of revenge
+upon her, because her disposition was so much more mature and yet more
+sprightly than mine. I induced her to lean over and smell the lovely
+lilies, and while she was doing so I, by giving her head a very slight
+push, buried her nose deep in the flowers and it became covered with
+yellow pollen. She was indignant! And the thought that I had acted so
+rudely tended to make the walk home a very painful one.
+
+The beautiful evenings of May! Had I not cherished memories of those of
+preceding years, or had they in truth been like this one? Like this one
+in the cold and lonely garden? Had they ended so miserably as did this
+play-day with Jeanne? With a feeling of mortal weariness I said to
+myself: "And is this all!" an exclamation which soon afterwards became
+one of my most frequent unspoken reflections, a phrase indeed that I
+might well have taken for my motto.
+
+When we returned I went to the wooden box to inspect our afternoon's
+work, and as I did so I inhaled the balsamic odor that had impregnated
+everything belonging to our theatre. For a long time after that, for
+a year or two, perhaps longer, the odor of the pine box containing the
+properties of the "Donkey's Skin" recalled vividly that May evening so
+filled with poignant sorrow, which was one of the most singular feelings
+of my childhood. Since I have come to man's estate I no longer suffer
+from anguish that has no known cause, doubly hard to endure because
+mysterious, I no longer feel as if my feet are treading unfathomable
+depths in search of a firm bottom. I no longer suffer without knowing
+why. No, such emotions belonged peculiarly to my childhood, and this
+book could properly bear the title (a dangerous one I well know): "A
+Journal of my extreme and inexplicable sorrows, and some of the boyish
+pranks by which I diverted my mind from them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII.
+
+
+
+It was about this time that I installed myself in my aunt Claire's room
+for the purpose of study, and there too I busied myself manufacturing
+wonders for the "Donkey's Skin." I took possession of the place as
+entirely as an army occupies a conquered country--I would not admit the
+possibility of being in the way.
+
+My aunt Claire was the person who petted me most. And it was she who was
+always so careful of my little things. She always looked after my finery
+or anything uncommonly fragile, things that the least breath of air
+would have blown away--such exquisitely delicate trifles, for example,
+as the wings of a butterfly, or the bright scale of a beetle, intended
+for the costumes of our nymphs and fairies--when I said to her: "Will
+you please take care of this, dear auntie?" I felt that I could be easy
+about it, for I knew that no one would be allowed to touch it.
+
+One of the great attractions in her room was a bear that was used
+for holding burnt-almonds; and I often visited the place for the sole
+purpose of paying my respects to this animal. He was made of china and
+he sat upon his hind legs in the corner of the mantelpiece. According to
+a compact that I had with my aunt, every time that his head was turned
+to the side (and I found it so several times during a day) it meant that
+there was an almond or some other kind of candy for me. When I had eaten
+this I straightened his head to indicate that I had been there, and then
+I departed.
+
+Aunt Claire enjoyed helping us with the "Donkey's Skin"; she worked
+enthusiastically over the costumes and each day I gave her some task.
+She was especially skilful in devising hair for the fairies and nymphs;
+she managed to fix upon their tiny heads, about as big as the end of
+a little finger, blond wigs made of light silk thread, this thread she
+twined upon the finest wires and thus she was able to twist it into
+beautiful ringlets.
+
+Then when it became absolutely necessary for me to study my lessons, in
+the feverish haste of the last half hour that I reserved for my task,
+after having wasted my time in idleness of every sort, it was aunt
+Claire who came to my rescue; she would open the large dictionary and
+hunt up for me the unfamiliar words in the exercises and lessons. She
+also took up the study of Greek in order to assist me with my lessons
+in that language. When I studied my Greek I always led my aunt Claire to
+the stairway and I sprawled there upon the steps, my feet higher than
+my head; for two or three years that was the classic pose I took for the
+study of the Iliad, or Xenophon's Cyropedia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+
+
+Thursday evening was a time of great rejoicing with me whenever a
+terrible storm descended upon Limoise, and thus made it impossible for
+me to return home that night.
+
+It happened occasionally; and since I had had the experience, I used to
+hope that it might occur often, and especially did I wish for a storm
+when I had failed to prepare my lessons. One inhuman professor had
+instituted Thursday tasks, and it was necessary for me to drag my text
+and copy-books with me to Limoise; my beloved holidays, spent in the
+sweet open air, were overcast by their dark shadow.
+
+One evening at about eight o'clock the much desired storm broke upon
+us with superb fury. Lucette and I were in the large drawing-room that
+resounded with the noise of the thunder, and we felt none too safe
+there. Its great wall-spaces were broken by only two or three old
+engravings in ancient frames. Lucette, under her mother's direction,
+was putting the finishing touches to a piece of needle work, and, on the
+rather worn-out piano, I was playing, with the soft pedal down, one of
+Rameau's dances; the old-fashioned music sounded exquisite to me as it
+mingled with the noise of the great thunder claps.
+
+When Lucette's work was completed, she turned over the leaves of my
+copy-book lying on the table. After she had examined it she gave me a
+meaning look, intended only for my eyes, that said as plainly as a look
+can that she knew I had neglected my task. Suddenly she asked: "where
+did you leave your Duruy's 'History'?"
+
+My Duruy's "History"! Where indeed had I left it? It was a new book with
+scarcely a blot in it. Great heavens! I had forgotten it and left it out
+of doors at the far end of the garden in the most removed asparagus bed.
+For my historical studies I had selected the asparagus bed which was
+like a bit of copse, for the feathery green plants, past their season,
+grew high and luxuriant; a hazel glen, leafy and impenetrable, and
+as shady as a verdant grotto, was the spot I had chosen for the more
+exacting and laborious work of Latin versification. As this time I was
+scolded by Lucette's mother for my great carelessness, we decided to go
+immediately and rescue the book.
+
+We organized a search party, and at the head of it went a servant who
+carried a stable-lantern; Lucette and I walked behind him. Our feet were
+protected from the wet ground by wooden shoes, and with much difficulty
+we held over us a large umbrella that the wind constantly turned inside
+out.
+
+Once outside I was no longer afraid; I opened my eyes wide and listened
+with all my ears. Oh! how wonderful, and yet how sinister, the end of
+the garden looked seen by those sudden and great flashes of green light
+that shimmered and trembled about us from time to time, and then left us
+blind in the blackness of the stormy night. And I shall never forget the
+impression made upon me by the continual crashing of the branches of the
+trees in the near-by oak forest.
+
+We found Duruy's "History" in the asparagus bed all water soaked and mud
+bespattered. Before the storm the snails, exhilarated no doubt by the
+promise of rain, had crawled over the book and they had left their
+slimy, glistening traces upon it.
+
+Those small tracks remained on the book for a long time, preserved,
+doubtless, by the paper cover that I put over them. They had the power
+to recall a thousand things to me, thanks to that peculiarity of my mind
+that associates the most dissimilar and incongruous images if only once,
+for a single favorable moment, they have been accidentally joined.
+
+And therefore the little, shining, zig-zag marks on the cover of Duruy
+always brought to my mind Rameau's gay dance that I played on the shrill
+old piano, only to have it drowned by the noise of the raging storm;
+and the same little blotches also recall to me a vision that I had that
+night (one, no doubt, born of an engraving by Teniers that hung on the
+wall); there seemed to pass before my eyes little people belonging to a
+bygone age who danced in the shade of a wood like that of Limoise; the
+apparition awakened in me an appreciation of the pastoral gayety of that
+time, a conception of the abandon and joyousness of the picnickers who
+were dancing so merrily under the spreading branches of the oak trees.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL.
+
+
+
+And yet the return home from Limoise Thursday evenings would have had
+a great charm but for the remorse I almost always felt because of
+neglected duties.
+
+My friends took me as far as the river in the carriage, or I rode on a
+donkey, or we walked. Once past the stony plateau on the south bank of
+the river, and once over it and upon the home side I found my father
+and sister awaiting me; I walked gayly beside them in the straight path
+lying between the extensive meadows that led to our house. I went at a
+brisk pace in my eagerness to see mamma, my aunts and our dear home.
+
+When we entered the town, by the old disused gate, it was always dusk,
+the dusk of a spring or summer night; as we passed the barracks we
+heard the familiar drums and bugles sounding the hour for the sailors'
+all-too-early bed.
+
+And when we arrived at the house I usually spied my beloved ones
+(clothed in their black dresses) seated in the honeysuckle arbor at the
+end of the yard, or they were sitting out under the stars.
+
+Or, if the others had gone in, I was sure to find aunt Bertha there
+alone; she was a very independent person, and she dared defy even the
+dew and evening chill. After kissing and embracing me she pretended to
+smell of my clothes, and after sniffing a minute, to make me laugh, she
+would say: "Ah! you smell of Limoise, my darling."
+
+And indeed I did have something of the fragrance of Limoise about me.
+When I came from there I was always impregnated with the odor of
+wild thyme and the other aromatic plants peculiar to that part of the
+country.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI.
+
+
+
+Speaking of Limoise I will be vain enough to speak here of an act of
+mine that I consider as brave as it was obedient, for it fell in with a
+promise that I had given.
+
+It happened a short time before my departure for the south, before that
+journey to the mountains with which my imagination was ever busy; it
+occurred in the month of July following my twelfth birthday.
+
+One Wednesday, having started earlier than usual, so that I might arrive
+at Limoise before nightfall, I begged those accompanying me to go no
+farther than just beyond the town; I entreated them, for this once, to
+allow me to make the journey alone as if I were a grown boy.
+
+As I was being ferried across the river I compelled myself to take from
+my pocket the white silk handkerchief that I had promised to wear
+about my neck to protect it from the cool breezes on the water; the old
+weather-beaten sailors were looking at me and I felt unspeakably ashamed
+as I tied the muffler around my neck.
+
+And at Chaumes, in that shadeless spot, a place always baked by the sun,
+I fulfilled the pledge that had been exacted from me at my departure. I
+opened a large sunshade!--oh! how my cheeks reddened and how humiliated
+I felt when I was ridiculed by a little shepherd-boy who, with head
+bared to the sun's rays, guarded his sheep. And my agony increased when
+I arrived at the village and I saw four boys, who had doubtless just
+come from school, look at me with astonishment. My God! I felt as if I
+would faint. It was true courage which enabled me to keep my promise at
+that moment.
+
+As they passed they stared hard as if to mock me for being afraid of the
+sun. One muttered something that had little enough meaning, but which
+I regarded as a mortal insult: "It is the Marquis of Carabas!" he said,
+and then all began to laugh heartily. But notwithstanding, I continued
+on my way with my parasol still open. I did not flinch nor answer them,
+but the blood surged to my cheeks and hummed in my ears.
+
+In the time that followed there were many occasions when it was
+necessary for me to pass upon my way without noticing the insults cast
+at me by ignorant people; but I do not recall that their taunts caused
+me any suffering. But my experience with the parasol! No, I am sure that
+I have never accomplished any braver act that that.
+
+But I am convinced that it is unnecessary for me to seek any other cause
+for my aversion to umbrellas, an aversion that followed me into mature
+age. And I attribute to handkerchiefs and such things, and to the
+excessive care my family took to stop up every chink through which air
+might reach me, my later habit, in line with my tendency to reactions,
+of exposing my breast to the burning rays of the sun, of exposing myself
+to every kind of wind and weather.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII.
+
+
+
+With my head pressed against the glass in the door of the railway coach
+that was going rapidly I continually asked my sister, who sat opposite:
+
+"Are we in the mountains yet?"
+
+"Not yet," she would answer, still remembering the Alps vividly. "Not
+yet, dear. Those are only high hills."
+
+The August day was warm and radiantly bright. We were in an express
+train going south, on our way to visit those cousins whom we had never
+seen.
+
+"Oh! but that one! See! See!" I exclaimed triumphantly, as my eyes spied
+an elevation towering above others; it was one whose blue height pierced
+the clear horizon.
+
+She leaned forward.
+
+"Ah!" she said, "that is a little more like a mountain, I must
+confess,--but it isn't a very high one, only wait!"
+
+At the hotel, where we were obliged to remain until the following day,
+everything interested us. I remember that night came suddenly, a night
+of splendor, as we leaned upon the railing of the balcony leading from
+our rooms, watching the shadows gather about the blue mountains and
+listening to the chirping of the crickets.
+
+The next day, the third of our frequently interrupted journey, we hired
+a funny little carriage to take us to the town, one much out of the line
+of travel at that time, where our cousins lived.
+
+For five hours we rode through passes and defiles--for me they were
+enchanted hours. Not only was there the novelty of the mountains, but
+everything here was unlike our home surroundings. The soil and the
+rocks were a bright red instead of, as in our village, a dazzling white
+because of the underlying chalk beds. And at home everything was flat
+and low, it seemed as if nothing there dared lift itself above the dead
+level and break the uniformity of the plains. Here the dwellings, of
+reddish hue like the rocks, and built with old gabled ends and ancient
+turrets, were perched high up on the hill; the peasants were very
+tanned, and they spoke a language I did not understand; I noticed
+particularly that the women walked with a free movement of the hips,
+unknown to the peasants of our country, as they strode along carrying
+upon their heads sheaves of grain and great shining copper vessels. My
+whole being vibrated to the charm of the unfamiliar beauty about me, and
+I was fascinated by the strange aspect of nature.
+
+Toward evening we reached the little town that marked the end of our
+journey. It was situated on the bank of one of those southern rivers
+that rush noisily over their shallow beds of white pebbles. The place
+still retained its ancient arched gateway and high, pierced ramparts;
+the prevailing color of the gothic houses lining its streets was bright
+red.
+
+A little perplexed and agitated our eyes sought for the cousins whose
+faces were not even known to us through photographs; but since they had
+been apprised of our coming they would, no doubt, be at the station to
+meet us. Suddenly we saw approaching us a tall young man, and he had
+upon his arm a young lady dressed in white muslin. Without the least
+hesitation we exchanged glances of recognition: we had found each other.
+
+At their house, on the ground floor, our uncle and aunt welcomed us;
+both of them in their old age preserved traces of a once-remarkable
+beauty. They lived in an ancient house of the time of Louis XIII; it
+was built in an angle, and was surrounded by those porches that are so
+frequently seen in small, southern mountain towns.
+
+When we entered we found ourselves in a vestibule flagged with pinkish
+stones and ornamented with a large fountain of burnished copper. A
+staircase of the same stones, as imposing as a castle staircase, with a
+curious balustrade of wrought-iron, led to the old-fashioned wainscoted
+bedrooms on the second floor. And these things evoked a past very
+different from that I had brooded over upon the Island, at St. Ongeoise,
+the only past with which I was at this time familiar.
+
+After dinner we went out and sat together upon the bank of the noisy
+river; we sat in a meadow overgrown with centauries and sweet marjoram,
+recognizable in the darkness because of their penetrating odor. It was a
+very still, warm evening and innumerable crickets chirped in the grass.
+It seemed to me that I had never before seen so many stars in the
+heavens. The difference in latitude was not so great, but the sea
+air that tempers our winters also makes our summer evenings hazy; in
+consequence we could see more stars here in this southern country with
+its clear atmosphere, than at our home.
+
+The majestic mountains surrounding us, from which I could not take my
+eyes, looked like great blue silhouettes: the mountains, never seen
+until now, gave me the feeling, so much longed for, of being in a
+distant country, they gave me the assurance that one of the dreams of my
+childhood had come true.
+
+I spent several summers in this village, and I made myself enough at
+home to learn the southern dialect spoken by the people there. Indeed
+the two provinces I became best acquainted with in my childhood was this
+southern one and that of St. Ongeoise, both of them lands of sunshine.
+
+Brittany, which so many take to be my native place, I did not see until
+a later time, not until I was seventeen, and I did not learn to love it
+until long after that,--doubtless that is why I loved it so ardently.
+At first it oppressed me and induced a feeling of extreme sadness;
+my brother Ives initiated me into its charm, a charm tinged with
+melancholy, and it was he who persuaded me to explore its thatched
+cottages and wooden chapels. And following this, the influence that a
+young girl of Treguier exercised over my imagination, when I was
+about twenty-seven, strengthened my love for Brittany, the land of my
+adoption.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+
+
+The day after my arrival at my uncle's I met some children named Peyrals
+who became my playmates. According to the fashion of that part of the
+country their baptismal names were spoken preceded by the definite
+article. The two little girls respectively ten and twelve years old were
+called "the Marciette" and "the Titi," and their younger brother, still
+a little chap, who did not, therefore, figure so largely in our plays,
+was called "the Medon."
+
+As I was younger in my ways than most boys of twelve,--in spite of
+my understanding of some things usually beyond the comprehension of
+children,--we immediately became a congenial little band, and for
+several summers we came together and enjoyed each other's companionship.
+
+The father of the little Peyrals owned all the forests and vineyards
+upon the hillsides about us. We had the freedom of them, were absolutely
+our own masters, and no one controlled or restrained us in any way, no
+matter how absurd we were.
+
+In that mountain village our relatives were so esteemed by the peasants
+living around them, that it was perfectly proper for us to wander any
+where and every where in search of adventures. We would start out very
+early in the morning upon mysterious expeditions, or we went to distant
+vineyards to have picnics or to chase butterflies that we never
+caught. Sometimes a little peasant would enlist in our ranks and follow
+submissively wherever we led. After the espionage to which I had been
+accustomed I found this liberty a delicious change. An altogether novel
+and independent life in the mountains; I might with some show of reason
+call it a continuation of my solitude, for I was the senior of these
+children who merely participated in my fantastic plays: between us there
+were abysmal differences springing from the quality of our minds and
+imaginations.
+
+I was always the undisputed chief of the band; Titi, the only one who
+ever revolted, was easily brought to terms; the children seemed to wish
+to please me in everything, and that made it very easy for me to manage
+them.
+
+That was the first little band I led. Later, other ones, less easy to
+cope with, came under my dominion; but I always preferred to have them
+composed of persons younger than myself, younger in mental development
+especially, and more simple in every way than I, so that they would not
+interfere with my whims, nor laugh at my childishness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+
+
+The only task required of me during my vacation was that I should read
+from Fenelon's Telemaque (my education, you see, was a little out
+of date). My copy of the work was composed of several small volumes.
+Strangely enough, it was not irksome to me. I could image to myself
+distinctly the land of Greece with its white marble temples and its
+bright sky, and I had a conception of pagan antiquity that was almost as
+vivid (if not so correct) as Fenelon's: Calypso and her nymphs enchanted
+me.
+
+Every day, in order to read, I hid myself from the Peyrals, either in
+my uncle's garden or in the garret of his house, my two favorite
+hiding-places.
+
+This garret, under the high Louis XIII roof, extended the full length of
+the house. The shutters of the place were seldom opened, and there
+was here, in consequence, almost perpetual twilight. The old things,
+belonging to a bygone century, lying there under the dust and cobwebs
+attracted me from the first day; and, little by little, the habit of
+slipping up there with my Telemaque had grown upon me. I usually stole
+up after the noon dinner, secure in the thought that no one would dream
+of looking for me there. At this noon hour of hot and radiant sunshine,
+the garret, by contrast, was almost as dark as night. Noiselessly I
+would throw open a shutter of one of the dormer windows and a flood
+of sunshine poured in; then I climbed out on the roof, and with elbows
+resting upon the sun-warmed old slate tiles overgrown with golden
+mosses, I would read my book.
+
+Around me, on this same roof, thousands of Agen plums were drying. This
+fruit, intended for winter use, was spread out on mats made of reeds;
+warmed through and through by the sun and thoroughly dried they were
+delicious; their fragrance, too, was exquisite and it impregnated the
+whole garret. The bees and the wasps who, like me, ate them at their
+pleasure, tumbled on their backs and extended their legs in the air,
+overcome seemingly by the cloying sweetness of the fruit and the heat
+of the day. And on the neighboring roofs, between the old gothic gables,
+there were similar reed mats covered with these same plums, all visited
+by myriads of buzzing wasps and bees.
+
+One could also see from here the two streets that came together in front
+of my uncle's house; they were lined with mediaeval dwellings, and each
+terminated at an arched door that was cut in the high red stone wall
+that had formerly served as a fortification. The village was hot and
+drowsy and silent, the heat of the mid-summer sun made it torpid; but
+one could hear innumerable chickens and ducks scratching and pecking
+at the sun-baked dirt in the streets. And far away in the distance the
+mountains pierced the cloudless blue of the heavens with their sunny
+heights.
+
+I read Telemaque in very small doses; two or three pages a day was
+generally enough to satisfy my curiosity and to ease my conscience
+for the day; that task over, I went down hurriedly to find my little
+friends, and we would set out on a trip to the woods and vineyards.
+
+My uncle's garden, my other place of retreat, was not attached to the
+house, but was situated, as were all the other ones in the village,
+beyond the ramparts of the town. It was surrounded by very high walls,
+and one had entrance to it through an old arched gate that was unlocked
+with an enormous key. Upon certain days, armed with my Telemaque and my
+butterfly-net, I isolated myself there.
+
+In the garden there were several plum trees, and from them there fell,
+onto the warm earth, over-ripe plums of the same variety as those drying
+on the ancient roofs. The old arbor was trellised with grape vines, and
+legions of flies and bees feasted upon the musky, fragrant grapes. The
+extreme end of the garden, for it was a very large one, was overgrown
+like an ordinary field with alfalfa.
+
+The charm of this old orchard lay in the feeling it gave one of being
+greatly secluded, of being absolutely alone in a wilderness of space and
+silence.
+
+I must not forget to speak of the old arbor that two summers later was
+the scene of the most momentous act of my childhood. It backed against
+the surrounding wall, and its lattice-work was overspread with muscadine
+vines that the sun scorched and withered.
+
+In this garden, for some inexplicable reason, I had the impression of
+being in the tropics, in the colonies of my fancy. And in truth the
+tropical gardens that I saw later were filled with the same heavy
+fragrance and had much the same appearance. From time to time rare
+butterflies, such as are not often seen elsewhere, flitted through
+the garden. From a front view they looked like common yellow and black
+butterflies, but a side view showed them to be as glistening and as
+beautiful a blue as the exotic ones from Guinea that I had seen under
+glass in my uncle's museum. They were very wary and difficult to
+ensnare, for they rested only for a second at a time upon the fragrant
+muscadel grapes before fluttering away over the wall. Sometimes I would
+place my foot in a crevice of the stone wall, and scramble up to the top
+to look after them as they flew across the hot and silent fields; and
+often I remained there on the coping for a long time, propped upon my
+elbows, and contemplated the distant landscape. Every where upon the
+horizon there were wooded mountains surrounded here and there by the
+ruins of feudal castles. Before me, in the midst of fields of corn and
+buckwheat, was the Bories estate. Its old arched porch, the only one
+in the neighborhood that was whitewashed, looked like one of those
+entry-ways that are so common in African villages. This estate, I had
+been told, belonged to the St. Hermangarde children, who were destined
+to become my future comrades. They were expected almost daily, but I
+dreaded to have them come, for my little band composed of the Peyrals
+seemed all sufficient and extremely well chosen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV.
+
+
+
+Castelnau! This ancient name brings to me visions of glorious sunshine
+and of clear light shining upon noble heights; it evokes the gentle
+melancholy that I felt among its ruins, and recalls to me my dreams
+before the dead splendors buried there for so many centuries.
+
+The old ruin of Castelnau was perched on one of the most heavily wooded
+mountains in the neighborhood, and its reddish stone turrets and towers
+stood out boldly against the sky.
+
+By looking over and beyond the wall surrounding my uncle's garden I
+could see the ancient castle. Indeed, it was a conspicuous point in the
+landscape, and one immediately saw its rough red stones emerging from
+the interlaced trees; one instantly noted the ancient ruin crowning the
+mountain all overgrown with the beautiful verdure of chestnut and oak
+trees.
+
+Upon the day of my arrival I had caught a glimpse of it, and I was
+attracted by this old eagle's nest which must have been a superb place
+of refuge during the stormy middle ages. It was a common custom in my
+uncle's family to go up there two or three times a month to dine and
+pass the afternoon with the proprietor, an old clergyman, who lived in a
+comfortable house built against one side of the ruin.
+
+For me those days were like a revel in fairy land.
+
+We started very early in the morning so that we should be beyond the
+plains before the hottest period of the day. When we arrived at the
+foot of the mountain we were refreshed by the cool shade of the forest,
+enveloped in its mantle of beautiful green. As we went up and up, by
+zig-zag paths, afoot, and in single file, under lofty arching oaks and
+intertwined foliage our line of march resembled a huge serpent. I was
+reminded of Gustave Dore's engravings of mediaeval pilgrims making their
+way to isolated abbeys perched on mountain heights. Tiny springs oozed
+out here and there and trickled across the red earth; between the trees
+we had momentary glimpses of beautiful and extensive vistas. At last we
+reached the summit, and after passing through the very quaint village
+that had perched on this height for many centuries, we rang the bell
+at the priest's tiny door. The castle overhung his miniature garden and
+house; both were built under the shadow of the crumbling walls and the
+sinking, almost tottering, red stone towers. A great peace seemed to
+emanate from those aerie ruins, and a deep silence reigned there.
+
+The dinners given by the old priest, to which several of the
+notabilities of the neighborhood were invited, always lasted very long.
+The ten or fifteen courses had an accompaniment of the ripest fruits and
+the choicest wines of that country so excelling in exquisite vintages.
+
+For several hours we remained at the table afflicted by the August or
+September midday heat, and I, the only child in the company, became very
+restless; I was disturbed by the thought of the crushing nearness of the
+castle, and after the second course I would ask to be permitted to leave
+the table. An old serving-woman used always to go with me and open the
+outer door in the wall of the feudal ramparts of Castelnau; then she
+confided the keys of the stately ruin to me, and I plunged alone, with
+a delicious feeling of fear, into the familiar path, and passed through
+the gate of the drawbridge superposed on the ramparts.
+
+There I might remain for an hour or two sure of not being disturbed; I
+was at liberty to wander about in that labyrinth, and I was master in
+the majestic but sad domain. Oh! the sweet memory of the reveries that
+I have had there! . . . First I would make a tour about the terraces
+overhanging the forest lying below; a panorama infinitely beautiful
+unrolled itself to my sight; rivers winding here and there in the
+distance looked like streams of silver; and, aided by the clear and
+limpid summer atmosphere, I could see almost as far as the neighboring
+provinces. A great calm pervaded this sequestered corner of France;
+no line of railway penetrated it; and in consequence, it led a life
+entirely apart from the big world, a life such as it had known in the
+good old time.
+
+After visiting the terraces I would go into the ruined interior, into
+the courts, up the stairways and through the empty galleries. I climbed
+to the old towers and put to flight flocks of pigeons, and disturbed the
+sleep of bats and owls. On the first floor there was a suite of spacious
+rooms, still roofed over, and very dark because of the shuttered
+windows. I penetrated into these chambers, and I felt an almost
+delicious terror when I heard my footsteps echoing through the
+sepulchral stillness of the place. Then I would pass in review before
+the strange Gothic paintings and the half-effaced frescoes that still
+retained traces of gilt ornamentation; the fabled monsters and garlands
+of impossible flowers had been added at the time of the Renaissance.
+This magnificent, pictured past, fantastic and barbarous to the point
+of being terrible, seemed to me, at that time, very vague and dim and
+distant; I could not realize that it had been lighted up by the same
+midday sunshine that warmed the red stones of the ruins about me. And
+now that I am better able to estimate Castelnau, when I recall it to my
+memory, after having seen most of the splendors of this earth, I still
+think the enchanted castle of my childhood, as it stands upon its
+glorious height, one of the most superb ruins of mediaeval France.
+
+In one of the towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal
+blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place
+have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the
+silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window
+cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying below me,
+and I tried to imagine that I saw coming along the paths, given over to
+the flight of birds, a cavalcade of soldiers, or a procession of noble
+knights and ladies. . . . And, for me, reared in a level country, one
+of the greatest charms of the place was the view I had of blue distances
+visible from every loophole and crevice, every gap and opening in the
+rooms and towers of Castelnau, for then I realized its extraordinary
+height.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+
+
+My brother's letters, written close on very fine paper, continued to
+reach us from time to time; he could only send them to us by sailing
+vessels bound in our direction which lay-to in that part of the world
+where he was stationed. Some of them were written particularly for me,
+and these were long, and filled with never-to-be-forgotten descriptions.
+I already knew several words of the sweet and liquid language of
+Oceanica, and often in my dreams I saw the exquisite island he described
+and roamed over it; it haunted my imagination as does a chimerical
+realm, ardently desired, but as inaccessible as if situated upon another
+planet.
+
+During my visit to my cousins my father forwarded me a letter from my
+brother addressed to me. I went up to the garret roof, on the side where
+the plums were drying, to read it. He wrote of a place called Fataua
+which was situated in a deep valley and surrounded by steep mountains.
+"A perpetual twilight," he wrote, "reigns here under the great exotic
+trees, and the spray of the cascade keeps the carpet of rare ferns
+fresh." Yes; I could picture that scene to myself very well, now that
+I had about me mountains and moist glens luxuriant with ferns. . . . He
+described everything fully and vividly: my brother could not know that
+his letters exercised a dangerous spell over the child who, at his
+departure, appeared to be so tranquil and so attached to the home
+fireside.
+
+"The only pity," he wrote at the end, "is that this delightful island
+has not a door opening into the home-yard, into the beautiful arbor
+overgrown with honeysuckle, for instance, that lies behind the grottoes
+and the little pond."
+
+This idea of a door in the wall at the foot of our garden, and
+especially the association between the little lake constructed by
+my brother and distant Oceanica, struck me as very singular, and the
+following night I had this dream:
+
+I went into the yard and found it enveloped in a sort of deadly twilight
+that gave me the impression that the sun had been extinguished forever.
+Every where there seemed to be an inexpressible desolation that is known
+only in dreams, and which it is almost impossible to conceive of in
+the waking state. When I arrived at the bottom of the garden near the
+beloved little lake, I felt myself rising from the ground like a bird
+about to take flight. At first I floated aimlessly as thistledown, then
+I passed over the wall and took a south-west direction, the direction of
+Oceanica; I had no trace of wings, and I lay on my back in an agony of
+dizziness and nausea as I travelled with frightful rapidity, with the
+swiftness of a stone shot from a sling. The stars whirled madly
+in space; beneath me oceans and seas faded into the pallid and
+indistinguishable distance, and as I journeyed I was ever enwrapped
+in that twilight bespeaking a dead world. . . . After a few minutes I
+suddenly found myself encompassed by the darkness of the noble trees in
+the valley of Fataua.
+
+There in the valley my dream continued, for I ceased to believe in
+it,--the utter impossibility of really being there impressed itself upon
+my mind,--for very often I had been duped by such illusions which always
+vanished when I awoke. My main concern was lest I should wake wholly,
+for the vision, incomplete as it was, enchanted me. At least the carpet
+of rare ferns was really there. As I groped in the night air and plucked
+them I said to myself: "Surely these plants are real, for I can touch
+them and I have them in my hand; surely they will not disappear when the
+dream vanishes." And I grasped them with all my strength to be sure of
+keeping them.
+
+I awoke. A beautiful summer day had dawned, and in the village was heard
+the noise of recommencing life. The continual clucking of the hens as
+they roamed about in the streets, and the click-clack of the weaver's
+loom caused me to realize where I was. My empty hand was still shut
+tight, and the nails were pressed almost into the flesh, the better to
+guard that imaginary bouquet of Fataua, composed of the impalpable stuff
+of dreams.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII.
+
+
+
+I had very quickly attached myself to my grown cousins, and I felt as
+well acquainted with them as if I had always known them. I believe it
+is necessary that there should be the bond of blood for the creation
+of those intimate relations between people, who but the day before were
+almost ignorant of each other's existence. I also loved my uncle and
+aunt; my aunt especially, who spoiled me a little, and who was so good
+and still so beautiful in spite of her sixty years, her gray hair and
+her grandmotherly way of dressing herself. In these levelling days,
+wherein one person is so like another, people of my aunt's type no
+longer exist. Born in the neighborhood, of a very ancient family, she
+had never been away from this province of France, and her manners, her
+hospitality, and her exquisite courtesy had a local stamp, every detail
+of which pleased me greatly.
+
+In direct contrast to my sheltered home life, here I lived almost
+entirely out of doors. I roamed about in the streets and highways, and
+often I went beyond the gates of the town. The narrow streets paved
+with black pebbles like those in the Orient, and bordered with gothic
+dwellings of the time of Louis XIII, had a singular charm for me. I
+already knew all the nooks and corners, public highways and the byways
+of the village, and I was well acquainted with many of the kind country
+people who lived about us.
+
+The women, peasant women with goitres, who passed my uncle's house on
+their way to and from the surrounding fields and vineyards, carried
+baskets of fruit on their heads, and they always paused to offer me
+luscious grapes and delicious peaches. I was delighted with the southern
+dialect, and with the songs of the mountaineers; and, best of all,
+my unfamiliar surroundings ever reminded me that I was in a strange
+country.
+
+And now when I see any of the little things that I brought from there
+for my museum, or when I look over the brief letters that I wrote to my
+mother every day, I suddenly feel the warm sunshine, I experience again
+the strange newness, I smell the fragrance of ripe southern fruits,
+and I feel the keen freshness of the mountain air; and at such times I
+realize that in spite of the long descriptions in these dead pages they
+inadequately express all I felt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII.
+
+
+
+The little St. Hermangardes, of whom every one spoke so often, arrived
+about the middle of September. Their castle was situated in the north
+upon the bank of the Carreze, but they came every year to pass the
+autumn in their very old and dilapidated mansion near my uncle's house.
+
+Two boys, both a little older than I, came this time, and contrary to
+my expectation I took a fancy to them immediately. As they were in the
+habit of spending a part of each year at their country place they had
+guns and powder and often went hunting. Thus they brought an entirely
+new element into our games. Their estate of Bories became one of the
+centres of our operations. Everything there was at our disposal,
+the servants and all the animals in the stables. One of our favorite
+amusements was the construction of enormous balloons, nine or ten feet
+high, and these we inflated by burning under them sheaves of hay; we
+then watched them rise and sail away and away, until they were lost to
+our sight high above the distant fields and woods.
+
+The little St. Hermangardes were unlike other children; they had had
+all their instruction from a tutor, and their ideas were different from
+those one imbibes at boarding schools. When there was any disagreement
+between us in regard to our games they always courteously gave in to me,
+and therefore my contact with them did not help me to meet the painful
+experiences of the future.
+
+One day they came over and with much grace made me a present of a very
+rare butterfly. It was of a pale yellow color, almost merging into light
+green, the yellow of a very ordinary butterfly, but its front wings
+were a shaded and exquisite pink, similar to the delicate rosy tints
+sometimes seen at daybreak. They had captured it, they said, in the
+late-ripening autumn grain fields of Bories,--they had caught hold of it
+so deftly and carefully that their fingers had made no impression upon
+its brilliant coloring. When, at about noontime, I received it from them
+I was in the vestibule of my uncle's house, a place always kept tightly
+closed during the hours of intense heat. From the wing of the house
+I heard my cousin singing in the thin and plaintive falsetto of a
+mountaineer; he often sang in that manner, and when he did so his voice
+always gave me a feeling of unusual melancholy as it broke the stillness
+of the late September noons. He sang over and over the same old refrain:
+"Ah! Ah! The good, good story. . . ." Here he always broke off and
+recommenced. And from that moment Bories, the pinkish-yellow butterfly,
+and the sad little refrain of the "good, good story" were inseparably
+associated in my memory.
+
+But I fear that I have said too much about the incoherent impressions
+and images which came to me so frequently in days gone by; this is the
+last time that I will speak at length of them. But it will be seen,
+because of what follows, how important it is for me to note the
+association existing between the dissimilar things mentioned above.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX.
+
+
+
+We left the mountains at the beginning of October, but my home-coming
+was marked by a very painful circumstance--I was sent to school! I went,
+of course, only as a day scholar; and it goes without saying that I was
+never allowed to go and come alone lest I should get into bad company.
+The four years that I spent at the university, as a day scholar, were
+as strange and as full of odd experiences as any of my life. But,
+notwithstanding, from that fatal day my history becomes much less
+interesting as a narrative.
+
+I was taken to school for the first time, at two o'clock in the
+afternoon, upon one of those glorious October days, so sunny and
+peaceful, that is like a reluctant and sad leave-taking of the
+summer-time. Ah! how beautiful it had been in the mountains, in the
+leafless forests and among the autumn-tinted vines!
+
+With a crowd of children, all talking at the same time, I entered the
+torture chamber. My first impression was one of astonished disgust
+because of the hideousness of the ink-stained walls, and of the old
+benches of shiny wood defaced by the penknife carvings of countless
+school-boys who had been so inexpressibly miserable in this place.
+Although I was a stranger to my new companions they treated me with the
+greatest familiarity (they used thee and thou in addressing me) and gave
+themselves patronizing airs that were almost impertinent. Although I
+observed my school-mates timidly and furtively I thought them, for the
+most part, exceedingly ill-mannered and untidy.
+
+As I was twelve and a half I entered the third class; my tutor
+considered me advanced enough to keep up with it if I chose to do so,
+although I myself felt that I was scarcely equal to the task. The first
+day, for the purpose of qualifying, we had to write Latin exercises, and
+I remember that my father awaited, with some anxiety, the outcome of the
+examination. When I told him I was second among fifteen I was surprised
+that he attached so much importance to a matter of so little interest
+to me. It was all one to me! Broken hearted as I felt, how could I be
+affected by such a trifle?
+
+Later, indeed, at no time, did I feel the impetus that the desire to
+excel brings with it. To be at the foot of the class always seemed to me
+the least of the ills that a school-boy is called upon to endure.
+
+The weeks following my entrance were extremely painful to me. I felt my
+intellect cramping rather than expanding under the multiplicity of the
+lessons and the tasks imposed; even the realm of my young dreams seemed
+closing against me little by little. The first dismal, foggy weather,
+and the first gray days added a greater desolation and sadness to my
+already overwrought feelings. The uncouth chimney-sweeps had returned,
+and their yearly autumn cry was again heard in the streets. Theirs was a
+cry that in my earlier years wrung my heart and caused my tears to flow.
+When one is a child the approach of winter, with its killing gloom and
+cold, seems to awake in him inexplicable forebodings bespeaking the end
+of all bright and beautiful things; time goes so slowly in childhood
+that we appear not to be able to anticipate the inevitable reawakening
+that comes in the spring to all things.
+
+No, it is only when we are older, and would seem, therefore, to be more
+impressionable to the changes of the seasons, that we regard winter
+merely as an incident having its rightful place among the other
+incidents of life.
+
+I had a calendar and I marked off upon it the slowly passing days. At
+the commencement of my first year of college life I was oppressed by the
+thought of the months of study stretching before me, and by the prospect
+of the interminable months that must come and go before we reached the
+Easter vacation that was to give us a respite of eight or ten days
+from the dreadful schoolroom grind and ennui; I seemed to lose all
+my courage, and at times I was almost overwhelmed with despair at the
+prospect of the long and dreary days that went so slowly.
+
+In the meantime cold weather, really cold weather set in and aggravated
+my sorrows. Oh! the daily journey to school upon those frigid December
+mornings, where for two deadly hours the only warmth we obtained came
+from the inadequate coal fire, and before me the torture of returning to
+my home in the face of the icy winter wind! The other children frolicked
+and ran and pushed each other, and they slid upon the ice when it
+chanced that the water in the gutters was frozen over. As for me I
+did not know how to slide, and, besides, sports such as the other boys
+indulged in, I considered highly undignified. I was always escorted
+to and from school very sedately, and I felt the humiliation of being
+conducted. I was sometimes laughed at by my school-mates with whom I was
+not at all popular; and I had a disdain for those who, like myself, were
+in bondage. I had scarcely an idea in common with them.
+
+Even Thursdays I had to give to the preparation of lessons that took the
+entire day. The written tasks, absurd exercises, I scrawled off in the
+most careless and illegible handwriting.
+
+And my disgust for life was so great that I no longer took the least bit
+of pains with myself; often now I was scolded for looking so unkempt,
+and for having dirty, ink-stained hands. . . . But if I continue in
+this strain I will succeed in making my recital as tedious as were the
+school-days of my youth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L.
+
+
+
+Cakes! Cakes! My good hot cakes! The old cake woman had resumed her
+nightly tour, and again we heard her rapid footsteps and her shrill
+refrain. Always at the same hour, with the regularity of an automaton,
+she went by our house. And the long winter recommenced in the same
+manner as had the preceding ones, and as were similarly to begin the
+following two or three years.
+
+Our neighbors, the D-----s, accompanied by Lucette, always came at eight
+o'clock Sunday evenings, and another neighbor visited us also upon
+this same evening. These latter brought with them their little daughter
+Marguerite, who gradually insinuated herself into my affections.
+
+That year Marguerite and I brought the Sunday winter evenings, over
+which the thought of the tasks of the morrow brooded sadly, to a close
+with an entirely new amusement. After the tea, when I felt that the
+party was about to break up, I would hurry little Marguerite into the
+dining-room, and there we rushed madly about the round table and tried
+to catch or tag each other,--we played furiously. It goes without saying
+that she was usually caught immediately and tagged very often, and I
+scarcely ever; it therefore fell out that it was almost always her turn
+to chase me, and she did it desperately. We struck the table with our
+bodies, and yelled, and carried on our play with the greatest imaginable
+uproar. We succeeded in turning up the rugs, in disarranging the
+chairs, and in making havoc of everything. We soon tired of our play,
+however,--the truth is I was too old to care greatly for such frolics.
+I had scarcely any feeling save one of melancholy in spite of the wild
+sport I indulged in, for over me hovered the chilling thought that in
+the morning the usual round of dry and laborious lessons would begin.
+My furious revel was simply a way of prolonging that day of truce, of
+making it count to its very last moment; it was an attempt to divert
+my thoughts by making plenty of noise. It was also my way of hurling a
+defiance at those tasks that I had left undone. My negligence troubled
+my conscience and disturbed my sleep, and caused me finally to look
+over, hastily and feverishly, by the feeble light of a candle, or by the
+cold gray light of early dawn, the neglected lessons, before the coming
+of the despised hour in which I betook myself to school.
+
+There was always a little consternation in the parlor when the sounds
+of our merriment reached those gathered there; it must have been
+particularly distressing to our parents to hear that we were amusing
+ourselves otherwise than with our duet sonatas, and to find that we
+preferred noise and discord to the "Pretty Shepherdess."
+
+And for at least two winters, at about half-past ten every Sunday
+evening, we indulged in that romp around the dining-table. My school
+was of little value to me, and the tasks imposed of even less benefit;
+I always went to work reluctantly and in the wrong spirit, and that
+lessened and extinguished my power and stupefied me. I had the same
+unfortunate experience when I came in contact with school-mates of my
+own age, my equals; their roughness disgusted me, and I repulsed all
+the efforts they made to be friendly. . . . I never saw them except in
+class, under the master's rod as it were; I had already become a little
+being too peculiar and set in my ways to be modified greatly by contact
+with them, and I therefore held aloof, and my eccentricities accentuated
+themselves.
+
+Almost all of them were older and more developed than I; they also
+were more crafty and more sophisticated; in consequence there sprung up
+amongst them a feeling of contempt and enmity for me that I repaid with
+disdain, for I felt sure that they were incapable of comprehending or
+following the flights of my imagination.
+
+With the very youthful peasants in the mountains, and the fishermen's
+children on the Island, I had never been haughty; we had understood each
+other after the fashion of children who are primitive and therefore fond
+of childish play; and upon such occasions I had associated with them as
+if they were my equals. But I was arrogant in my behavior to the boys at
+school, and they had good reason to consider me whimsical and priggish.
+It took me many years to conquer that arrogance, to act simply and like
+other people in the world; and especially it was difficult for me to
+realize that one is not necessarily superior to his fellows because he
+is (to his own misfortune often) prince and conjurer in the realm of
+fancy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LI.
+
+
+
+The theatre wherein was enacted the "Donkey's Skin," very much amplified
+and more elaborate, had now a permanent place in my aunt Claire's room.
+Little Jeanne, more interested in it since the additions to the scenery
+and the text, came over oftener; she painted backgrounds under my
+direction, and the moments I enjoyed most were those in which I
+impressed her with my great superiority. We had now a box full of
+characters, each with a name and a role; and the fantastic processions
+were made up of regiments of monsters, beasts and gnomes made out of
+plaster and painted with water colors.
+
+I recall our delight and enthusiasm when we tried for the first time the
+effect of a scenic background which we had made to represent the "void
+of heaven." Delicate rosy clouds, bespeaking the dawn, floated over the
+blue expanse that was softened and paled by the gauze hanging in
+front of it. And the chariot of a silken-haired fairy, drawn by two
+butterflies and suspended on invisible threads, advanced towards the
+centre of the scene.
+
+But in spite of our efforts our work was never finished, for we took
+no account of limitations; every day we had new ideas and ever more and
+more wonderful projects, and the great comprehensive representation was
+deferred from day to day, was postponed to a future that never came.
+
+Every undertaking of my life will be, or has already been, left
+unfinished and incomplete as was that little play of the "Donkey's
+Skin."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LII.
+
+
+
+Among those professors who seemed, during my school-days, so severe, and
+indeed almost cruel to me, the most terrible without any exception were
+the "Bull of Apis" and the "Big Black Ape" (I had nicknames for all
+of them). I hope should they read this they will understand that I am
+writing from the child's view-point. Should I meet them to-day I would,
+in all probability, humbly tender them my hand and ask their pardon for
+having been such an unmanageable pupil.
+
+Oh! the Big Ape especially, how I hated him! When from the height of his
+desk these words fell upon my ear: "You will do a hundred lines; I
+mean you, you little sap-head!" I could have flown at his face like an
+enraged cat. He was the first to arouse in me those sudden and violent
+outbursts of rage that characterized me as a man, outbreaks which
+could scarcely have been foreseen in a child of my sweet and patient
+disposition.
+
+I would be doing myself a great injustice in saying that I was
+altogether a bad scholar, I was, rather, an unequal and erratic one; one
+day at the head of my class, the next day at the foot; but on the whole
+I maintained a fair average, and at the end of the year I received the
+prize for translation--I won no others however. It surprised me that
+every one in the class did not receive the prize that I had won without
+great effort, for translation was extraordinarily easy for me. On the
+other hand I found composition very difficult, and narration still more
+so.
+
+Little by little I deserted my own work-desk, and in my aunt Claire's
+room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation
+as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the
+wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still
+visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the
+"Big Ape"; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has
+endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness,
+and a sensation of suffocation chills me through and through--in short I
+once more live over those dread school-days.
+
+Aunt Claire was more than ever my resource during those hard times; she
+always looked up words for me in the dictionary, and often she took upon
+herself the task of writing for me, in an assumed hand, the exercises
+exacted by the "Big Ape."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIII.
+
+
+
+Bring me, please, dear, the second . . . no, the third drawer of my
+chiffonier.
+
+It is mamma who is speaking; she is busying herself with the drawers
+of the chiffonier which every day, for many years, she had asked me
+to bring to her,--sometimes she pretends to need them merely for the
+purpose of pleasing me by requiring my services. It was one of the
+things that I was able to do for her when I was very little: to carry
+to her one or another of those tiny drawers. It was an honored custom in
+our household for a long time.
+
+At the time of my life of which I am now writing it was in the evening,
+at dusk, after my return from school, that I busied myself carrying
+the little chiffonier drawers. I usually found mamma seated in her
+accustomed place near the window chatting or embroidering, her work
+basket was before her, and the bureau, whose different compartments
+she required from time to time, was situated some distance away, in an
+anteroom.
+
+The Louis XVth chiffonier was very much revered, for it had belonged to
+great-grandmothers. In it there were some very old and very tiny painted
+boxes which had doubtless been handled every day by one or another of
+our ancestresses. It goes without saying that I knew all the secrets of
+these compartments that were kept in such exquisite order; there was
+a special place for silks that was classified by being put into ribbon
+bags; one for needles, another for braid, and still another for little
+hooks. And these things were still arranged, I have no doubt, as they
+had been in our grandmother's days, whose saintly activity my mother
+imitated.
+
+To bring the drawers of the chiffonier to mamma was the joy and pride
+of my childhood, and there has been no change in my feelings for those
+little compartments since that time. They have always inspired me with
+the most tender respect; they are blended with the image of my
+mother and they recall to me her beautiful, skillful hands, ever busy
+manufacturing some pretty, useful article,--even to her last piece of
+embroidery which was a handkerchief for me.
+
+In my seventeenth year, when we met great reverses--at that troubled
+time of which I will not speak here, but only mention because I have
+already, in preceding chapters, touched upon the matter--we had to face,
+for several months, the dreadful possibility of being obliged to part
+with our old home and all the precious things that it contained. At that
+time when I passed in review all the beloved memories and habits and
+mementoes that I would need to break with, one of my most agonizing
+thoughts was: "Never more will I be able to come and go in the
+ante-chamber where the chiffonier stands, nor never again be able to
+carry its precious little drawers to mamma."
+
+And her very old-fashioned work-basket that I had begged her not to
+discard, although it was much worn, with its little articles, needle
+books, receptacles for thimbles and screws for holding the embroidery
+frames! The thought that a time must surely come when the well-beloved
+hands that daily touch these things will touch them no more, fills me
+with so much sorrow that I am bereft of all courage and I struggle in
+vain against invading sad emotions. Let me hope that as long as I live
+it may remain as it is, that for so long it will be guarded with the
+sacredness of a relic; but to whom can I bequeath this heirloom with
+the assurance that it will be cherished? What will become of those poor
+little trifles that are so precious to me?
+
+That work-basket belonging to my mother, and the little drawers of the
+old chiffonier are, I doubt not, the things that I will part with most
+regretfully when the time comes for me to go into the world.
+
+Truly all of this is very puerile and childish, and I am ashamed of
+it;--and yet I am almost weeping as I write it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIV.
+
+
+
+Because of the haste and confusion brought about by conflicting school
+tasks, I had not for many months found time to read my Bible; indeed I
+scarcely had time for a morning prayer.
+
+I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there
+together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so
+many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is
+associated in my memory with my mother.
+
+It was at church, however, that my faith continued to receive its most
+damaging blows; it was there that religion seemed a cold and meaningless
+term to me. Usually the commentaries, the narrow human reasoning and
+dissection took away from the beauty of the Bible and the Gospels,
+and deprived them of their grandly solemn and exquisite poetry. For a
+peculiar nature like mine it was very difficult to have any one touch
+upon holy subjects (in such a way as did the minister) without in some
+measure, in my opinion, desecrating them. The family worship, held every
+evening, awakened in me the only religious meditation that I now knew,
+for the voice that read or prayed was exceedingly dear to me, and that
+changed everything.
+
+My untiring contemplation of nature, and the reflections that I indulged
+in in the presence of the fossils I had brought from the mountains and
+cliffs, and placed in my museum, indicated that there had been bred in
+me a vague and unconscious pantheism.
+
+In short my deeply rooted and still-living faith was covered over with
+encumbering earth. At times it threw out a green shoot, but for the most
+part it lay like an entirely dead thing in the cold ground. Moreover, I
+was too much troubled to pray; my conscience, still restive and timid,
+gave me no rest during the time that I was on my knees,--I always felt
+remorse gnaw at me then because of the slovenly and half-done tasks, and
+because of the feelings of hate I had for the "Big Ape" and the "Bull
+of Apis," emotions that I was obliged to hide and disguise until I
+shuddered at the falsehoods I spoke and acted. These things gave me
+poignant remorse and excruciating moral distress, and to escape from
+these emotions I indulged in noisy sports and foolish laughter; and
+when my conscience troubled me most, and I dared not, therefore, appear
+before my parents, I took refuge with the servants, played tennis,
+jumped the rope, or make a great racket.
+
+For two or three years I had not spoken of a religious vocation, for
+I now understood that such a desire was a thing of the past, was
+impossible; but I had not found anything to put in its place. When
+strangers asked what career I was being prepared for, my parents, a
+little anxious in regard to my future, did not know what to say; and I
+knew still less what to reply.
+
+However my brother, who was also much concerned over my enigmatical
+future, in one of those letters that seemed always to come from an
+enchanted land, suggested, because of a certain facility in mathematics
+and a certain precision of nature, certainly anomalies in one of my
+temperament, that it might be well for me to study engineering. And
+when they consulted me and I replied apathetically: "Very well, it is
+agreeable enough to me," the matter seemed satisfactorily settled.
+
+I would need to spend a little more than a year at a polytechnic school
+in order to prepare myself. To be there or elsewhere, what difference
+did it make to me? . . . When I contemplated the men of a certain age
+who surrounded me, those occupying the most honorable positions, who
+had every claim to respect and consideration, I would say to myself:
+"It will some day be necessary for me to live a useful, sedate life in
+a given place and fixed sphere as they do, and to grow old as they
+are--and that is all!" And a bitter hopelessness overwhelmed me as I
+brooded on the thought; I yearned for the impossible; I longed most of
+all to remain a child forever, and the reflection that the years were
+fleeing, and that, whether I would or would not, I must become a man,
+was anguish to me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LV.
+
+
+
+Twice a week, in the history classes, I came in contact with the naval
+students. To give themselves a sailor-like appearance they wore red
+sashes, and they constantly drew ships and anchors on their copy-books.
+
+I never dreamed of that career for myself; scarcely oftener than once
+or twice had such a thought passed through my mind and then it had
+disquieted me: it was, however, the only life in which I could indulge
+my taste for travel and adventure. It terrified me, this naval career,
+more than any other because of the long exiles it imposed, exiles that
+faith could no longer make seem endurable, as in the days when I had
+expressed a desire to become a missionary.
+
+To go far away as my brother had done; to be separated from my mother
+and other beloved ones for years and years; not to see during that time
+the little yard reclothe itself in green at the coming of the spring,
+nor to see the roses bloom upon the old wall, no, I had not the courage
+to undertake it.
+
+Because it was assumed, doubtless because of my peculiar education, that
+such a rough life was wholly unsuited to me. And I knew very well, from
+some words that had been spoken in my hearing, that should so wild an
+idea gain a lodgment with me my parents would withhold their consent and
+thwart me in every way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVI.
+
+
+
+On my Thursday holidays during the winter, after having finished
+my duties and accomplished all my school tasks, I felt the greatest
+homesickness when I mounted to my museum. It was always a little late
+when I finished my lessons, and the light was usually fading when I
+looked down at the great meadows that appeared inexpressibly melancholy
+as they stretched before me enwrapped in a grayish-pink mist. I was
+homesick for the summer, homesick for the sun and the south, all of
+which were suggested by the butterflies from my uncle's garden that I
+had arranged and pinned under glass, and by the mountain fossils that
+the little Peyrals and I had collected in the summer time.
+
+It was a foretaste of that longing for somewhere else which later, after
+my return from long voyages to tropical countries, spoiled my visits to
+my home.
+
+Oh! there was in particular the pinkish-yellow butterfly! There were
+times when I experienced a bitter pleasure in seeking to understand the
+great sadness that it caused me. It was in the glass case at the far
+end of the room; its two colors so fresh and unusual, like a Chinese
+painting, or a fairy's robe, were exquisite foils for each other; the
+butterfly formed a luminous whole that shone out brightly in the gray
+twilight, and it caused the other butterflies surrounding it to look as
+dull as dun-colored little bats.
+
+As soon as my eyes rested upon it I seemed to hear drawled out lazily,
+in a mountaineer's treble, the refrain: "Ah! ah! the good, good story!"
+And again I saw the white porch of Bories in the midst of the silence
+and the hot sunshine of a summer noon. A deep regret for past and
+gone vacations took possession of me; I felt saddened when I tried to
+recreate days belonging to a dead past, and tried to imagine vacations
+still to come; but mingled in with sentiments that I can name, there
+were those other inexpressible ones that well up from the unfathomable
+deeps of one's being.
+
+This association between the butterfly, the song and Bories caused me
+for a long time an extreme sadness that, try as hard as I may, I cannot
+explain satisfactorily; and the feeling continued until stormy and
+tempestuous winds swept over my life and carried away with them the
+small concerns belonging to my childhood.
+
+Sometimes, upon gray winters evenings, when I looked at the butterfly
+I would sing to myself the little refrain of the "good, good story;" to
+accomplish this I had to make my voice very flute-like; and as I sang,
+the porch of Bories appeared to me more vividly than ever, as it stood,
+sunny but desolate, under the dazzling light of the September noon. This
+association was a little like the one that later established itself for
+me between the sad falsetto of the Arab songs, the snowy splendor of
+their mosques and the winding-sheet whiteness of their lime-washed
+porticos.
+
+That butterfly in all the freshness and radiance of its two strange
+colors, mummified, it is true, but as brilliant looking as ever under
+its glass, retains for me a sort of old-time charm which I cherish. The
+little St. Hermangardes, whom I have not seen for many years, and who
+are now attached to an embassy somewhere in the Orient, would
+doubtless, should they read this, be much astonished to learn what value
+circumstances has given to their little present.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVII.
+
+
+
+The chief event of these winters, so poisoned by my college life, was
+the gift-giving festival that we had at New Year.
+
+At about the end of November it was our custom, my sister's, Lucette's
+and mine, to make out a list of the things we desired most. Everybody in
+the two families prepared surprises for us, and the mystery surrounding
+these gifts was our most exquisite pleasure during the last days of the
+year. Between parents, grandmother and aunts there occurred, to excite
+my curiosity still further, conversations full of mysterious hints, and
+whisperings that were hastily discontinued as soon as I appeared.
+
+Between Lucette and me it became a real guessing game. As in the play of
+"Words with a double meaning," we had the right to ask certain pointed
+questions,--for example we asked the most ridiculous ones, such as: "Has
+it hair like an animal?"
+
+And the answers went something after this fashion:
+
+What your father is to give you (a dressing-case made of leather)
+had hair, but it has none now, except on some portion of its interior
+(brushes), and that is false. Your mamma's present (a fur muff) still
+has some hair. What your aunt is to give you (a lamp) will help you to
+see the hair on the others better; but, let me see, yes, I am sure that
+that has none.
+
+In the December twilights, in that hour between daylight and darkness,
+we would sit upon our low stools before the wood-fire, and continue our
+series of questions from day to day. We grew ever more eager and excited
+until the 31st, and in the evening of that momentous day the mysteries
+were revealed.
+
+That day the presents for the two families, wrapped, tied and labeled,
+were piled upon tables in a room closed against Lucette and me. At eight
+o'clock the doors were thrown open and we filed in, the elders going
+first, and each one of us sought for his own gift among the heap of
+white parcels. For me the moment of entry was an exceedingly joyous one,
+and until I was twelve or thirteen years of age, I could not refrain
+from jumping and leaping like a kid long before it came time for us to
+cross the threshold.
+
+We had supper at eleven, and when the clock in the dining room struck
+the midnight hour, tranquilly, in harmony with the sound of its calm
+stroke, we separated in the first moments of those New Years that
+are now buried under the ashes of many succeeding ones. And on those
+evenings I fell asleep with all my gifts in my room near me. I even
+kept the favorite ones upon my bed. The following morning I always waked
+earlier than usual so that I might re-examine them; they cast a spell of
+enchantment over that winter morning, the first one of a new year.
+
+Once there was, among my presents, a large illustrated book treating of
+the antediluvian world.
+
+Through the study of fossils I had already been initiated into the
+mysteries of prehistoric creations. I knew something about those
+terrible creatures that in geologic times shook the primitive forests
+with their heavy tread; for a long time the thought of them disquieted
+me. I found them all in my book pictured in their proper habitat,
+surrounded by great brakes, and standing under a leaden sky.
+
+The antediluvian world already haunted my imagination and became the
+constant subject of my dreams; often I concentrated my whole mind upon
+it, and endeavored to picture to myself one of its gigantic landscapes
+that seemed ever enveloped in a sinister and gloomy twilight with a
+background filled in with great moving shadows. Then when the vision
+thus created took on a seeming reality I felt an inexpressible sadness
+that was like an exhalation of the soul,--as soon as the emotion passed
+the dream-structure vanished.
+
+Soon after this I sketched a new scene for the "Donkey's Skin;" it
+was one representing the liassic period. I painted a dismal swamp
+overshadowed by lowering clouds, where, in the shave-grass and the
+gigantic ferns, strange extinct beasts wandered slowly.
+
+The play of the "Donkey's Skin" seemed no longer the same Donkey's Skin.
+I discarded one by one the little stage people who now offended me by
+their uncompromising doll-like stiffness; they were relegated to their
+card-board box, the poor little things, where they slept the sleep
+eternal, and without doubt they will never be exhumed.
+
+My new scenes had nothing in common with the old fairy spectacle: in the
+depths of virgin forests, in exotic gardens, and oriental palaces
+formed of pearls and gold I tried to realize, with the small means at
+my command, all my dreams, while waiting for that improbable better time
+that ever lies in the future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVIII.
+
+
+
+That hard winter passed under the ferule of the "Bull of Apis" and the
+"Great Ape," finally came to an end and spring returned; it was always
+a troublous time for us, the scholars, for the first mild days gave us
+a great longing to be out, and we could scarcely hide our restlessness.
+The roses budded everywhere upon our old walls; my beloved little
+garden, bright and warm under the March sunshine, tempted me, and I
+would tarry there a long time to watch the insects wake up, and to see
+the early butterflies and bees fly away. Even the revised "Donkey's
+Skin" was neglected.
+
+I was no longer escorted to and from school, for I had persuaded my
+family to discontinue a custom that made me ridiculous in the eyes of
+my companions. Often, before returning home, I would take a long and
+roundabout way and pass by the peaceful ramparts from where I had
+glimpses of other provinces, and a sight of the distant country.
+
+I worked with even less zeal than usual that spring, for the beautiful
+weather that tempted me out of doors turned my head and made study
+almost impossible.
+
+Assuredly one of the things for which I had the least aptitude was
+French composition; I generally composed a mere rough draught without a
+particle of embellishment to redeem it. In the class there was a boy who
+was a very eagle, and he always read his lucubrations aloud. Oh! with
+what unction he read out his pretty creations! (He is now settled in a
+manufacturing town, and has become the most prosaic of petty bailiffs.)
+One day the subject given out was: "A Shipwreck." To me the words had
+a lyrical sound! But, nevertheless, I handed in my paper with only the
+title and my name inscribed upon it. No, I could not make up my mind
+to elaborate the subjects given to us by the "Great Ape"; a sort of
+instinctive good taste kept me from writing trite commonplaces, and as
+for putting down things of my own imagining, the knowledge that they
+would be read and picked to pieces by the old bogey made it impossible
+for me to compose anything.
+
+I loved, however, even at this time, to write for myself, but I did it
+with the greatest secrecy. Not in the desk in my room that was profaned
+by lessons and copy-books, but in the little old-fashioned one that was
+part of the furniture of my museum, there was hidden away a unique thing
+that represented my first attempt at a journal. It looked like a sibyl's
+conjuring book, or an Assyrian manuscript; a seeming endless strip
+of paper was rolled upon a reed; at the head of this there were two
+varieties of the Egyptian sphinx and a cabalistic star drawn in red
+ink,--and under these mysterious signs I wrote down, upon the full
+length of the paper and in a cipher of my own invention, daily events
+and reflections. A year later, however, because of the labor involved in
+transcribing the cryptographic characters I had chosen I discarded them
+and used the ordinary letters; but I continued my work with the greatest
+secrecy, and I kept my manuscript under lock and key as if it were an
+interdicted book. I inscribed there, not so much the events of my almost
+colorless existence, as my incoherent impressions, the melancholy that
+I felt at twilight, my regret for past summers, and my dreams of distant
+countries. . . . I already had a longing to give my fugitive emotions a
+determinative quality, I needed to wrestle against my own weaknesses
+and frailties and to banish, if possible, the dream-like element that
+I seemed to discover in all the things about me, and for that reason I
+continued my journal until a few years ago. . . . But at that time the
+mere idea that a day might come when someone would have a peep at it was
+insupportable to me; so much so indeed that if I left home and went to
+the Island or elsewhere for a few days, I always took care to seal up my
+journal, and with the greatest solemnity I wrote upon the packet: "It is
+my last wish that this book be burned without being read."
+
+God knows, I have changed since then. But it would be going too far
+beyond the limits of this story of my childhood to recount here through
+what changes in my life's view-point it chances that I now sing aloud
+of my woes, and cry out to the passers-by, for the purpose of drawing
+to myself the sympathy of distant unknown ones; and I call out with the
+greater anguish in proportion as I feel myself approaching nearer and
+nearer to the final dust. . . . And who knows? perhaps as I grow older
+I may write of those still more sacred things which at present cannot be
+forced from me,--and by that means try to prolong beyond the bounds of
+my individual life, memory of my being, of my sorrows, and joys, and
+love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIX.
+
+
+
+The return that spring of little Jeanne's father from a sea voyage
+interested me greatly. For several days her house was topsy-turvy with
+preparation, and one could guess the joy they felt over his approaching
+arrival. The frigate that he commanded reached port a little earlier
+than his family expected it, and from my window I saw him, one fine
+evening, hurrying along the street alone, on his way home to surprise
+his people. He had arrived from I know not which distant colony after an
+absence of two or three years, but it did not seem to me that he was
+the least altered in appearance. . . . One could then return to his
+home unchanged? They did come to an end after all, those years of exile,
+which now I find, in truth, much shorter than they seemed in those days!
+My brother himself was to return the following autumn, and it would
+doubtless then seem as if he had never been away from us.
+
+And what joyous events those home-comings were! And what a distinction
+surrounded those who had but newly returned from so great a distance!
+
+The next day in Jeanne's yard I watched them unpack the enormous wooden
+boxes that her father had brought from strange countries; some of them
+were covered with tarpaulin cloth,--pieces of sails no doubt, that were
+impregnated with the agreeable odor of the ship and the sea; two sailors
+wearing large blue collars were busy uncording and unscrewing them;
+and they took from them strange looking objects that had an odor of the
+"colonies;" straw mats, water jars and Chinese vases; even cocoanuts and
+other tropical fruits.
+
+Jeanne's grandfather, himself an old seaman, was standing near me
+watching from the corner of his eye the process of unpacking; suddenly,
+from between the boards of a case that was being broken open with a
+hatchet, there crawled out hastily some ugly little brown insects that
+the sailors jumped on with their feet and destroyed.
+
+"Cockroaches are they not, Captain?" I inquired of the grandfather.
+
+"Ha! How do you know that, you little landlubber?" he laughingly
+responded.
+
+To tell the truth, I had never seen any such insects before; but uncles
+who had lived in the tropics often spoke of them. And I was delighted to
+make the acquaintance of these tiny creatures that are peculiar to ships
+and to warm countries.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LX.
+
+
+
+Spring! Spring!
+
+The white roses and the jasmine bloomed on our old garden wall, and the
+deliciously fragrant honeysuckle hung its long garlands over it.
+
+I began to live there from morning until night in closest intimacy with
+the plants and the old stones. I listened to the sound of the water as
+it plashed in the shade of the majestic plum tree, I studied the grasses
+and the wood mosses that grew at the edge of my little lake; and upon
+the warm side of the garden where the sun shone all through the day, the
+cactus put out its buds.
+
+My Wednesday evening trips to Limoise commenced again,--and it goes
+without saying that I dreamed of the beloved place from one week to the
+next to the detriment of my lessons and my other duties.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXI.
+
+
+
+I believe that that spring was the most radiant and the most ravishingly
+happy one of my childhood, in contrast no doubt to the terrible winter
+spent under the rigorous care of the Great Ape.
+
+Oh! the end of May, the high grass and then the June mowing! In what a
+glory of golden light I see it all again!
+
+I took evening walks with my father and sister as I had done during
+my earlier years; they now came to meet me at the close of school,
+at half-past four, and we set out immediately for the fields. Our
+preference that spring was for a certain meadow abloom with pink
+amourettes, and I always brought home great bouquets of these flowers.
+
+In that same meadow a migratory and ephemeral species of moth, black
+and pink (of the same pink as the amourettes) had hatched out, and they
+slept poised on the long stalks of the grass, or flew away as lightly as
+the flowers shed their petals when we walked through the hay. . . . And
+all of these things appear to me again as I saw them in the exquisite,
+limpid June atmosphere. . . . During the afternoon classes, the thought
+of the sun-dappled meadows made me more restless than did even the mild
+air and the spring odors that came in through the open windows.
+
+I cherish particularly the remembrance of an evening in which my mother
+had promised, as a special favor, to join us in our walk to the fields
+of pink amourettes. That afternoon I had been more inattentive than
+usual, and the Great Ape had threatened to keep me in, and all during
+my lessons I firmly believed that I was to be punished. This keeping
+in after school, which shut us away from the beautiful June day an
+hour longer, was always a cruel torture. But to-day my heart felt
+particularly heavy as I reflected that mamma would, doubtless, come at
+the appointed hour and expect me,--and with some bitterness I thought
+that the springtime was so very short, that the hay would soon need to
+be cut, and that perhaps there would not be, the whole summer long, such
+another glorious evening as this one.
+
+As soon as school was over I anxiously consulted the fatal list in
+the hands of the monitor; my name was not there! The Big Black Ape had
+forgotten me, or had been merciful!
+
+Oh! with what joy I rushed away to join mamma who had kept her promise
+and who, with my father and sister, smilingly awaited me. . . . The air
+that I breathed in was more delicious than ever, it was exquisitely soft
+and balmy, and the atmosphere had a tropical resplendence.
+
+When I recall that time, when I think of those meadows all abloom with
+amourettes, and of those pink moths, there is mingled, to my regret, a
+sort of indefinable pain whose intensity I cannot understand, an anguish
+I always feel when I find myself in the presence of things that impress
+and charm me with their undercurrent of mystery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXII.
+
+
+
+I have already said that I was extraordinarily childish for my years.
+
+If the personage I then was could but be brought into the presence of
+the little Parisian boys of twelve or thirteen, educated according to
+the more perfect modern method, who at so early an age declaim, discuss
+and harangue, and entertain all sorts of political ideas, I would, I am
+sure, be struck dumb by their discourses, and how singular they would
+find me and with what disdain they would treat me!
+
+I am myself astonished at the childishness that I displayed in certain
+ways, for in artistic perception and imagination, in spite of my lack
+of method, and lack of real knowledge, I was incontestably more advanced
+than are the majority of boys of my age; if that youthful journal,
+the strip of paper wrapped about a reed in the similitude of a
+conjuring-book, of which I spoke a short time ago, were still in
+existence it would emphasize twenty fold this pale record, on which it
+seems to me there has already fallen the dust of ages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIII.
+
+
+
+My room where I now scarcely ever installed myself to study, and which
+I seldom entered except at night to sleep, became, during the beautiful
+month of June, my palace of delight, and I went there after dinner to
+enjoy the long, and mild, and beautiful twilights. I had invented a
+sport which I deemed an improvement upon the rag-rat trick that the
+dirty little street urchins whisked, at the end of long strings, about
+the feet and legs of the passers-by. My game amused me greatly and I
+prosecuted it with vivacity. It would, I think, amuse me still if I
+dared play it, and I hope that my trick will be imitated by all the
+youngsters who are imprudently allowed to read this chapter.
+
+On the other side of the street, just opposite my window, and similarly
+upon the second floor there lived the good old maid, Miss Victoire--(she
+wore a great old-fashioned frilled cap and round spectacles). I had
+obtained permission from her to fix to the fastening of her shutter a
+string that I then brought all across the street and into my window, the
+remainder of this string I rolled upon a stick, ball-fashion.
+
+In the evening, as soon as the light waned, a bird of my own
+manufacture--a sort of absurd and impossible crow, made out of iron wire
+and with black silk wings--came slyly from between my venetian blinds
+that I immediately closed after the exit of the creature, this bird
+descended in a droll way and posed on the paving stones in the middle
+of the street. A ring on which it was suspended, and which allowed it to
+slip freely the length of the string, was not visible because of the
+dim light, and from time to time I made the crow hop and skip comically
+about on the ground.
+
+And when the passers-by paused to gaze at this unlikely looking bird
+that fluttered about so gayly--whiz! I would pull the string that I held
+firmly in my hand, and the bird would leap from under their very noses
+and mount high in the air.
+
+Oh! how amused I was, those beautiful evenings, when I peeped out from
+behind my venetian blinds; how I laughed to myself over the surprised
+exclamations and the bewilderment of those fooled, and how I enjoyed
+rehearsing to myself their probable reflections and guesses. And to me
+the most astonishing part was that after the first moment of surprise,
+the persons whom I tricked laughed as heartily as I; it should be
+mentioned that the majority of those passing were neighbors who must
+certainly have had some inkling of the mystifying joke about to be
+played on them. I was much loved in the neighborhood at that time. Or
+if the pedestrians chanced to be sailors, the easy going fellows,
+themselves only grown children, were much delighted with my child's
+play.
+
+What will always remain an incomprehensible mystery to me is that in my
+family, where we seldom sinned through an excess of reserve towards
+each other, they shut their eyes to my trick, and thus tacitly gave me
+permission to play it during the entire spring; I am not able to explain
+to myself how it chanced that they failed to correct me, and the years
+instead of clearing up this mystery only serve to intensify it.
+
+That black bird has naturally become one of my many relics; at
+intervals, during the past two or three years, I have looked at it; it
+is somewhat dingy, but it always recalls to me the beautiful evenings
+in June, now vanished, the delicious intoxication of that springtime of
+long ago.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV.
+
+
+
+Those Thursdays at Limoise when the fierce heat of the noon-day sun
+overwhelmed everything, and the country side lay asleep and silent under
+its pitiless rays, it was my habit to clamber up to the top of the old
+wall that enclosed the garden, and there I sat astride and immovable for
+a long time. The branching ivy reached to my shoulders and innumerable
+flies and locusts buzzed around me. From the height of this observatory
+I had a view of the hot and lonely region lying beyond, of the moorland
+and woodland, and from there I saw a thin white veil of mist that was
+agitated ceaselessly by the waves of heat, as the surface of a tiny lake
+is ruffled by the least wind. Those horizons seen from Limoise still had
+for me the strange mystery I had endowed them with in the first summers
+of my life. The region visible from the top of the wall was a rather
+solitary one, and I tried to make myself believe that the waste land
+and woodland was a veritable untrodden country that stretched out
+indefinitely; and although I now knew well that about me everywhere
+there were roads; cultivated fields, and prosperous villages, I
+succeeded in clinging to the illusion that the surrounding country and
+contiguous lands were wild and primitive.
+
+And the better to deceive myself I took care to shut out, by looking
+through my fingers folded together spy-glass fashion, all that would
+have spoiled for me the impression of loneliness; an old farm house, for
+instance, with its bit of cultivated vineyard and smooth road.
+
+And there all alone, in that silence murmurous with the buzzing of many
+insects, distracted by nothing, always turning my hollowed hand towards
+the most desolate portion of the landscape, I succeeded in gaining an
+impression of distant, tropical countries.
+
+I had impressions of Brazil particularly, but I do not know why in those
+moments of contemplation the neighboring forest always suggested that
+country to me.
+
+In passing I must describe this forest, the first one of all the earth's
+forests that I knew, and the one I loved the best: the straight, slim
+trunks of the ancient evergreen oaks, of sombre foliage, were like the
+columns of a church; not a particle of brush grew under them, but the
+dry soil was covered all the year with the most exquisite short grass,
+soft and fine as down, and here and there grew furze, dropwort and other
+rare flowers that thrive in the shade.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXV.
+
+
+
+The Iliad was being explained to us in class,--no doubt I would have
+loved it, but our master had made it odious by his analysis, his
+difficult tasks and his parrot-like recitals;--but suddenly I stopped,
+filled with admiration of a famous line, whose end is musical as the
+murmur of the waves of the incoming tide as they spread their sheets of
+foam upon the pebbly shore.
+
+"Observe," said the Big Ape, "observe the inceptive harmony."
+
+Zounds! Yes, I had observed it. Little need to take the trouble to point
+out such a sentence to me.
+
+I also had a great admiration, less justified perhaps, for some lines
+from Virgil.
+
+Since the beginning of the Ecloque I had, with the greatest interest,
+followed the two shepherds as they made their way across the fields
+of ancient Rome. I could picture it to myself so vividly, those Roman
+meadows of two thousand years ago: hot, a little sterile, with thickets
+of almost petrified shrubs, and evergreen oaks like the stony moorland
+of Limoise, where I had experienced precisely the pastoral charm that I
+discovered in this description of a past time.
+
+Onward went the two shepherds, and suddenly, they perceived that their
+journey was half over, "because the tomb of Bianor was immediately below
+them . . ." Oh! how vividly I saw that tomb of Bianor disclose itself to
+their view. Its old stones, that made a white blot on the reddish road,
+were covered with tiny sun-scorched plants, wild thyme or marjoram, and
+here and there grew stunted dark foliaged shrubs. And the sonority of
+the word Bianoris with which the sentence ended suddenly and magically
+evoked for me the musical humming of the insects that buzzed around the
+two travellers who, upon that bygone day in June, walked onward in the
+great silence and serene tranquillity of the hot noon enkindled by a
+younger sun. I was no longer in the schoolroom; I was in the meadows
+with the shepherds walking with them this radiant summer day through the
+sun-scorched flowers and grass of a Roman field,--but still all seemed
+softened and vague as if looked at through a telescope that had the
+power to draw into its line of vision ages long past.
+
+Who knows? Perhaps if the Big Ape could but have divined the causes
+that led to my momentary inattention it might have brought about an
+understanding between us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVI.
+
+
+
+One Thursday evening at Limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my
+departure, I went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in
+which I slept. First I leaned out of the open window to watch the July
+sun sink behind the stony fields and fern heaths that lay towards the
+sea, which though very near us was invisible. These sunsets at the end
+of my Thursday holidays always overwhelmed me with melancholy.
+
+During the last minutes of my stay I felt a desire, one I had never
+known before, to rummage in the old Louis XV bookcase that stood near
+my bed. There among the volumes in their century-old bindings, where
+the worms, never disturbed, slowly bored their galleries, I found a book
+made of thick rough old-fashioned paper, and this I opened carelessly.
+. . . In it I read, with a thrill of emotion, that from noon until
+four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 20th of June, 1813, south of
+the equator, in longitude 110 and latitude 15 (between the tropics,
+consequently, and in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean) there was
+fair weather, a beautiful sea, a fine southeast breeze, and in the
+sky many little clouds called "cat-tails," and that alongside the ship
+dolphins were passing.
+
+He who had seen the dolphins pass, and who had recorded the fugitive
+cloud forms had doubtless been dead for many years. I knew that the
+book was what is called a ship's log-book, one in which seafaring people
+write every day. Its appearance did not strike me as strange, although
+I had never before had one in my hand. But for me it was a wonderful
+and unexpected experience to thus suddenly come into a knowledge of the
+aspect of the sea and sky in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, at
+a given time in a year long past. . . . Oh! for a glimpse of that
+beautiful and tranquil sea, of those "cat-tails" that dotted the deep
+blue arch of the sky, and of those dolphins that swiftly traversed the
+lonely southern waters!
+
+In this sailor's life, in this profession so terrifying (a career
+forbidden to me), how many delightful things happened! I had never until
+this evening realized it with such intensity.
+
+The memory of that hasty little reading is the reason why, during my
+watches at sea, whenever a helmsman signals a passage of dolphins, I
+have always turned my eyes in their direction to watch them; and it
+has always given me a peculiar pleasure to note the incident in the
+log-book, differing so little from the one in which the sailors of June,
+1813, had written before me.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVII.
+
+
+
+During the vacation that followed, our departure for the south and the
+mountains enchanted me more than did my first trip there.
+
+As in the preceding summer we started, my sister and I, at the beginning
+of August. While it was no longer a journey of adventure, the pleasure
+of returning and again finding there all the things that had formerly so
+delighted me surpassed the charm of going forth to meet the unknown.
+
+Between the point where the railroad ended and the village in which
+our cousins lived, in the course of the long carriage ride, our little
+coachman, in venturing to take what he supposed a short cut, lost his
+way, and he carried us into the most exquisite forest nooks. The weather
+was beautiful and radiant. With what joy I saluted the first peasant
+women whom I saw walking along with great copper water-jars upon their
+heads, and the first swarthy peasants conversing in the well remembered
+dialect, how I rejoiced when we rolled along over the blood-colored
+roads, and when the mountains junipers came into view.
+
+At about noon-time we stopped in a shady valley in a sequestered village
+called Veyrac to rest our horses, and we seated ourselves at the foot of
+a chestnut tree. There we were attacked by the ducks of the place, the
+boldest and most ill bred in the world. They flocked around us in an
+unseemly manner, uttering shrill cries and quacking hideously. As we
+departed, even after we were in our carriage, these infuriated creatures
+followed us; whereupon my sister turned towards them, and with all the
+dignity of an old-time traveller outraged by an inhospitable population
+exclaimed: "Ducks of Veyrac, be ye accursed!" And for several years
+I could not keep a straight face when I remembered the foolish and
+prolonged laughter that I indulged in at the time. Above all I cannot
+think of that day without regretting the resplendence of the sun and the
+blue sky, a resplendence that I never see now.
+
+As we drew near we were met on our way at the bridge spanning the river,
+by our cousins and the Peyrals. I discovered with pleasure that my
+little band was complete. We had all grown taller by several inches; but
+we found immediately that we were not otherwise changed, we were still
+children ready for the same childish games.
+
+At night-fall there was a terrific storm. And while the thunder boomed
+around us as if it was bombarding the roof of my uncle's house, and when
+all the old stone gargoyles in the village were pouring forth torrents
+of water that rushed tumultuously over the black pebbles in the street,
+we took refuge, the little Peyrals and I, in the kitchen, and there we
+made a racket and joyously danced around in a ring.
+
+It was a very large kitchen, furnished in an old-fashioned way with a
+perfect arsenal of burnished copper utensils; every variety of pan and
+kettle, shining like pieces of armor, hung on the halls in the order of
+their size. It was almost dark, and from the moist earth came the fresh
+odor one usually smells after a storm, after a summer rain; and through
+the thick iron-barred Louis XIII windows the lurid, green lightning
+flashed incessantly and blinded us and compelled us, in spite of
+ourselves, to close our eyes. We turned round and round like mad beings,
+and sang together: "The star of night whose peaceful light." . . . It
+was a sentimental song, never intended for dance music, but we scanned
+it drolly and mockingly, and thus made of it an accommodating and
+tuneful dance measure. We continued our joyous sport for I do not
+know how long a time; we were excited by the noise of the storm and
+we whirled around like little dervishes; it was a merry-making in
+celebration of my return; it was a fitting way of inaugurating the
+holidays; it was a defiance to the Big Ape, and it was an appropriate
+prologue to the series of expeditions and childish sports of every kind
+that were to recommence, with more ardor than ever, the next day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII.
+
+
+
+The following morning at daybreak when I awoke, a noisy cadence, to
+which I was unaccustomed, fell upon my ears; the neighboring weaver had
+already commenced, even with the dawn, to work his ancient loom, and the
+musical to and fro of its shuttle had roused me. Then after the first
+drowsy, dreamy moment I remembered, with overwhelming joy, that I was
+at my uncle's in the south; that this was the morning of the first day;
+that I had before me the prospect of a whole summer of out-of-door
+life and wildest liberty--had August and September, two months that at
+present pass as quickly as if they were but two days, but which then
+seemed of a fairly respectable duration. With a feeling of rapture,
+after I had wholly shaken off my sleep, I came into a full consciousness
+of myself and the realities of my life; I felt "joy at my waking."
+
+The preceding winter I had read a story of the Indians of the Great
+Lakes, and one thing in it had impressed me so deeply that I always
+remembered it: an old Indian chief, whose daughter was pining away
+because of her love for a white man, had finally consented to give her
+to the alien so that she might once more feel "joy at her waking."
+
+Joy at her waking! Indeed, for some time I had myself noticed that the
+moment of waking is always the one in which I had the most distinct and
+vivid impression of joy or sorrow; and it is then, at the waking hour,
+that one finds it so particularly painful to be without joy; my first
+little sorrows and remorses, my anxieties about the future, were the
+things that usually obtruded themselves cruelly--however the feeling of
+sadness vanished very quickly in those days.
+
+At a later time I had very gloomy and sad awakenings. And there are
+times now when I have moments of terrifying clearness of vision during
+which I seem to see, if I may so express it, into the depths of life;
+it is at such moments that life presents itself to me without those
+pleasing mirages that during the day still delude me; during those
+moments I appear to have a more vivid realization of the rapid flight
+of the years, the crumbling away of all that I endeavor to hold to, I
+almost realize the final unimaginable nothingness, I see the bottomless
+pit of death, near at hand, no longer in any way disguised.
+
+But that morning I had a joyful awaking, and unable to remain quietly
+in bed, I rose immediately. So impatient was I to be out that I scarcely
+took time to ask myself where I should begin my first day's round of
+visits.
+
+I had all the nooks and corners of the village to see again, the gothic
+ramparts and the lovely river; and my uncle's garden to revisit, where
+probably, since last year, the rarest butterflies had become domiciled.
+I had visits to make to the ancient and curious houses in the
+neighborhood, where lived all the kind old women who, in the past
+summer, had lavished upon me their most luscious grapes as if they were
+my feudal due;--there was in particular a certain Madame Jeanne, a rich
+old peasant, who had taken so great a fancy to me that she liked to
+humor my every whim, and who, for my amusement, every time she passed on
+her way, like Nausicaa, from the washing-place, looked comically out of
+the corner of her eyes towards my uncle's house. And, too, there were
+the surrounding vineyards, and woods, and mountain paths; and beyond,
+Castelnau, rearing its battlements and towers above the pedestal of
+chestnuts and oak trees, called me to its ruins! Where should I run
+first, and how could I ever weary of so beautiful a land!
+
+The sea, to which I was now scarcely ever taken, was for the moment
+completely forgotten.
+
+After these two happy months school was to re-open. I could not bear
+to think of it, but its monotony would be broken by a great event, the
+return of my brother. His four years were not quite completed; but we
+knew that he had already left the "mysterious island," and we expected
+him to arrive home in October. For me it would be like becoming
+acquainted with a stranger. I was somewhat anxious to know whether he
+would love me when he met me, if he would approve of a thousand little
+things I did,--how, for instance, my way of playing Beethoven would
+please him.
+
+I thought constantly of his approaching arrival; I was so overjoyed, and
+I anticipated with so keen a delight the change his coming would make in
+my life, that I did not feel a particle of the melancholy which usually
+beset me in the autumn.
+
+I meant to consult him about a thousand troublous matters, to confide to
+him all my anguish and uncertainty in regard to the future; I knew also
+that my parents depended upon him to give them definite advice about me,
+and expected him to direct me towards a scientific career: that was the
+one dark spot upon his return.
+
+Awaiting his dread decision, I threw aside all care and amused myself
+as gayly as possible; I put even less restraint than usual upon myself
+during the vacation which I regarded as likely to be the very last of my
+childhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIX.
+
+
+
+After the noon dinner it was the custom in my uncle's house to sit for
+an hour or two in the entry-way of the house, that vestibule inlaid with
+flagstones and ornamented with a large, burnished, copper fountain, for
+it was the coolest place during the heated period of the day. Here
+it was almost dark, for everything was closed; two or three rays of
+sunshine, in whose light the flies danced, filtered in through the
+cracks of the massive Louis XIII door. In the silent village no one
+was astir, and one heard there only the everlasting clucking of the
+hens,--all other living creatures seemed asleep.
+
+I, however, did not remain long in the cool vestibule. The bright
+sunshine lured me out; and, too, scarcely had I installed myself there
+in the circle before I heard a knocking at the street door: the three
+little Peyrals had come to fetch me, and to apprise me of their presence
+they lifted the old iron knocker that was hot enough to burn their
+fingers.
+
+Then with hats pulled over our eyes and equipped with hammers, staffs
+and butterfly-nets we would start out in search of new adventures. First
+we passed through the narrow gothic streets paved with pebbles, then we
+struck into the paths that lay just beyond the village, paths that were
+always covered with wheat-chaff that got into our shoes, and into which
+we sank ankle deep; finally we reached the open country, the vineyards,
+and the roads that led to the woods, or better still those that brought
+us to the river which we forded by means of the flower-covered islets.
+
+This wild liberty was a complete avengement for the monotony of my
+cribbed and cabined home life, ever the same all the year through; but I
+still lacked the companionship of little boys of my own age, I needed to
+clash with them,--and, too, this freedom lasted only a couple of months.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXX.
+
+
+
+One day I had a great desire, wherefore I do not know, unless out of
+pure bravado and the spirit of perversity, to do something unseemly.
+After having searched all of one morning for this something I found it.
+
+It is well known that the swarms of flies which one finds in the south
+during the summer, and which contaminate everything are a veritable
+plague. I knew that there was a trap set for them in the middle of my
+uncle's kitchen. It was a treacherous pipe of a special shape, at
+the bottom of which, in the soapy pan of water there, the flies were
+invariably drowned. Now on the particular day in which I felt so
+devilish I bethought me of that disgusting blackish mass at the bottom
+of the vessel, made up of the thousands of flies drowned during the past
+two or three days, and I wondered what sort of toothsome dish I should
+make of it, a pancake, perhaps, or better still, an omelette.
+
+Quickly and nervously, and with a loathing that almost made me vomit, I
+poured the pasty black mass into a plate and carried it to the house of
+old Madame Jeanne, the only one in the world willing to do anything and
+everything for me.
+
+"A fly omelette! To be sure! Why not! That is very simple!" she
+exclaimed. She went immediately to the fire with a frying pan and some
+eggs. She gave the unclean mess a good preliminary beating, and then she
+placed it on her high and ancient fireplace. As I watched her procedure
+I was dismayed and surprised at myself.
+
+But the three little Peyrals, whom I had met unexpectedly, went into
+such ecstasies over my idea, a thing they always did, that I was
+fortified; and when the omelette, at just the right time, was turned out
+hot upon a plate we started forth triumphantly to carry the exhibit
+home to show to our families. We formed a procession in the order of our
+respective heights, and as we marched we sang, "The Star of Night" in
+voices loud and hoarse enough to summon the devil to earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXI.
+
+
+
+In the mountains the end of summer was always a beautiful season, for
+the meadows lying at the foot of the hillside forests, already yellow,
+were purple with crocuses. Then, too, the vintage commenced and lasted
+for about fifteen days,--days of enchantment for us.
+
+We now spent most of our time in the shady nooks of the woods and
+meadows in the neighborhood of the Peyral vineyards; there we had
+play-dinners consisting of candy and fruits. We would spread out on the
+grass what we considered a most elegant cloth, and this we decorated,
+after the old fashion, with garlands of flowers, and we put on it plates
+made of yellow and red vine leaves. The vintagers brought us the most
+luscious grapes, bunches chosen from among a thousand; and, with
+the heat of the sun to aid, we sometimes became a little tipsy, not,
+however, made so by sweet wine, for we had drunk none, but by the juice
+of the grapes merely, in the self-same fashion as did the wasps and
+flies that warmed themselves upon the trellises. . . .
+
+One morning at the end of September, when the weather was rainy and it
+was chilly enough for me to realize that melancholy autumn was near
+at hand, I was attracted into the kitchen by the bright wood fire that
+leaped gayly in the high, old-fashioned chimney-place. And as I stood
+there, idle and out of sorts, because of the rain, I amused myself by
+melting a pewter plate and plunging it, in its liquid state, into a pail
+of water.
+
+The result was a shapeless, bright, and silvery-gray lump which very
+much resembled silver-ore. I looked at the mass thoughtfully for some
+time: an idea germinated, and there and then I planned a new amusement
+which became our most delightful pastime during those last days of
+vacation.
+
+That same evening we held a conference on the steps of the great
+stairway, and I told the Peyrals that from the aspect of the soil and
+the plants I had come to the conclusion that there were silver mines in
+this part of the country. As I spoke I assumed the knowing and bold
+airs of one of those venturesome scouts, who is usually the principal
+personage in old-fashioned stories of American adventure.
+
+Searching for mines fell well into line with the abilities of my
+little band, for often, armed with pick and shovel, they had set out to
+discover fossils or rare stones.
+
+The next day, therefore, half way up the mountain, when we arrived at
+a path chosen by me for its appropriateness, for it was lonely
+and mysterious, shut in by forest trees and embedded between high,
+moss-grown, rocky banks, I stopped my little band peremptorily, as if I
+were endowed with the keen scent of an Indian chief. I pretended that
+I had here recognized the presence of precious ore-beds; and, in truth,
+when we dug in the place I indicated we found the first nuggets, the
+melted plate that I had buried there the day before.
+
+These mines occupied us constantly until the end of my stay. The Peyrals
+were convinced and full of amazement, and although I spent some time
+each morning in the kitchen melting plates and covers to feed our vein
+of silver, I very nearly deluded myself into believing in the reality of
+the mine.
+
+The isolated silent spot, so exquisitely beautiful, where these
+excavations took place, and the melancholy but enchanting serenity of
+the end of summer, gave a rare charm to our little dream of adventure.
+We were, however, most amusingly secret and mysterious in regard to
+our discovery; we considered it a tribal secret, and we cherished it as
+such.
+
+Our riches, mixed in with some of the red mountain soil, we hoarded in
+an old trunk in my uncle's attic as if the latter were an Ali Baba's
+cave.
+
+We pledged ourselves to leave it there during the winter, until the next
+vacation, at which time we counted on making additions to our treasure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXII.
+
+
+
+In the first week of October we received a joyous telegram from our
+father bidding us leave for home as speedily as possible. My brother,
+who was returning to Europe by a packet-boat on its way from Panama, was
+to disembark at Southampton; we had but just time to reach home if we
+wished to be there to welcome him.
+
+We arrived the evening of the third day just in time, for my brother was
+expected a few hours later on the night train. I had barely time to put
+into his room, in their accustomed places, the various little trinkets
+that he had four years previously confided to my care, before the hour
+set for our departure to the station to meet him. To me his return,
+announced so unexpectedly, did not seem a reality, and I was so excited
+that for two nights I scarcely slept at all.
+
+This is why, in spite of my impatience to see my brother, I fell asleep
+at the station; when he appeared it seemed a sort of dream to me. I
+embraced him timidly, for he was very different from my mental image of
+him. He was bronzed and bearded, his manner of speech was more rapid,
+and, with a slightly smiling, slightly anxious expression, he regarded
+me fixedly, as if to ascertain what the years had done for me, and to
+deduce from that what my future was to be.
+
+When I returned home I fell asleep standing; it wad the dead sleepiness
+of a child fatigued by a long journey, against which it is futile to
+struggle, and I was carried to my bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII.
+
+
+
+I awaked the following morning with a feeling of joyousness that
+penetrated to the very depths of my being, and as I remembered the cause
+for my happiness my eyes fell upon an extraordinary object standing on a
+table in my room. It was evidently a very slim canoe with a balance beam
+and sails. Then my gaze encountered other unfamiliar objects scattered
+about: necklaces of shells strung on human hair, head-dresses of
+feathers, ornaments appertaining to a dark and primitive savagery; it
+was as if distant Polynesia had come to me during my sleep. My brother,
+it seems had already begun to open his cases, and while I slept he had
+slipped noiselessly into my room and grouped around me these ornaments
+intended for my museum.
+
+I jumped out of bed quickly so that I might go and find him, for I had
+scarcely seen him the evening before.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV.
+
+
+
+And it seems I hardly saw him during those hurried weeks that he spent
+with us. Of that period, which lasted so short a time, I have very
+confused visions, similar to those one has of things seen during a
+rapid journey. I remember vaguely that we lived more gayly, and that
+his presence among us brought many young people to our house. I remember
+also that he seemed at times to be preoccupied and absorbed by things
+entirely outside the family sphere; perhaps he had longings for the
+tropics, for the "delicious island," or it may be he dreaded his early
+departure.
+
+Sometimes I held him captive near the piano by playing for him the
+haunting music of Chopin which I had but just begun to understand. He
+was disquieted however by my playing, and he said that Chopin's music
+was too exuberant and at the same time too enervating for me. He had
+come among us so recently that he was better able to judge of me than
+were the others, and he realized perhaps that my intellect was in danger
+of becoming warped through the nature of the artistic and intellectual
+effort it put forth; no doubt he thought Chopin and the "Donkey's
+Skin" equally dangerous, and considered that I was becoming excessively
+affected and abnormal in spite of my fits of childish behavior. I am
+sure that he thought even my amusements were fanciful and unhealthy. Be
+that as it may, he one day, to my great joy, decreed that I should learn
+to ride horseback, but that was the only change his coming made in my
+education. Cowardice prompted me to defer discussion of those weighty
+questions appertaining to my future which I was so anxious to talk over
+with him; I preferred to take my time, and, too, I shrunk from making
+a decision, and thus by my silence I sought to prolong my childhood.
+Besides, I did not consider it a pressing matter after all, inasmuch as
+he was to be with us for some years. . . .
+
+But one fine morning, although we had reckoned so largely on keeping
+him, there came news of a higher rank and an order from the naval
+department commanding him to start without delay for a distant part of
+the orient, where an expedition was organizing.
+
+After a few days which were mainly spent in preparing for that
+unforeseen campaign he left us as if borne away by a gust of wind.
+
+Our adieus were less sad this time, for we did not expect him to be
+absent more than two years. . . . In reality it was his eternal farewell
+to us; whatever is left of his body lies at the bottom of the Indian
+Ocean, towards the middle of the Bay of Bengal.
+
+When he had departed, while the noise of the carriage that was bearing
+him away could still be heard, my mother turned to me with an expression
+of love that touched me to the very innermost fibre of my being; and as
+she drew me to her she said with the emphasis of conviction: "Thank God,
+at least we shall keep you with us!"
+
+Keep me! . . . They would keep me! . . . Oh! . . . I lowered my head and
+turned my eyes away, for I could feel that their expression had changed,
+had become a little wild. I could not respond to my mother with a word
+or a caress.
+
+Such a serene confidence upon her part distressed me cruelly, for the
+moment in which I heard her say, "We shall keep you," I understood, for
+the first time in my life, what a firm hold on my mind the project of
+going away had taken--of going even farther than my brother, of going
+everywhere upon the face of the earth.
+
+A sea-faring life terrified me, and I relished the idea of it as little
+as ever. To a little being like me, so greatly attached to my home,
+bound to it by a thousand sweet ties, the very thought of it made my
+heart bleed. And besides, how could I break the news of such a decision
+to my parents, how give them so much pain and thus flagrantly outrage
+their wishes! But to renounce all my plans, always to remain in the same
+place, to be upon this earth, and to see nothing of it--what a squalid,
+disenchanting future! What was the use to live, what the good of growing
+up for that?
+
+And in that empty parlor with its disordered chairs, one even
+overturned, and while I was still under the dark spell of our sad
+farewells, there beside my mother, leaning against her with eyes turned
+away and with soul overwhelmed with sorrow, I suddenly remembered the
+old log-book which I had read at sunset last spring at Limoise. The
+short sentences written down upon the old paper with yellow ink came
+slowly back to me one after the other with a charm as lulling and
+perfidious as that exercised by a magic incantation:
+
+"Fair weather . . . beautiful sea . . . light breeze from the south-east
+. . . Shoals of dolphins . . . passing to larboard."
+
+And with a shudder of almost religious awe, with pantheistic ecstasy, my
+inward eye saw all about me the sad and vast blue splendor of the South
+Pacific Ocean.
+
+A great calm, tinged with melancholy, fell upon us after my brother's
+departure, and to me the days were monotonous in the extreme.
+
+They had always thought of sending me to the Polytechnic school, but
+it had not been decided upon irrevocably. The wish to become a sailor,
+which had obtruded itself upon me almost against my will, charmed and
+terrified me in an almost equal degree; I lacked the courage necessary
+to settle such a grave matter with myself, and I always hesitated to
+speak of it. The upshot was that I decided to reflect over it until my
+next vacation, and thus by my irresolution and delay I secured to myself
+a few more months of careless childhood.
+
+I still led as solitary a life as ever; it was very difficult for me to
+change the bent that my mind had taken in spite of my mental distress
+and in spite of my latent desire to roam far and wide over the earth.
+More than ever I stayed in the house and busied myself painting stage
+scenery, and playing Chopin and Beethoven; to all appearances I was
+tranquil and deeply absorbed in my dreams, and I became ever more and
+more attached to my home, to its every nook and corner, even to the
+stones in its walls. It is true that now and again I took a horseback
+ride, but I always went with a groom and never with children of my own
+age--I still had no young playmates.
+
+My second year at college was much less painful than my first; it passed
+more quickly, and moreover I had formed an attachment for two of my
+classmates, my elders by a year or two, the only ones who had not the
+preceding year treated me disdainfully. The thin ice once broken, there
+had sprung up between us an ardent and sentimental friendship; we even
+called each other by our baptismal names, something that was contrary
+to school etiquette. Since we never saw each other except in the
+schoolroom, we were obliged to communicate in mysterious whispers
+under the teacher's eye, our relations, consequently, were inalterably
+courteous and did not resemble the ordinary friendship between boys. I
+loved them with all my heart; I would have allowed myself to be cut into
+bits for them; and, in all sincerity, I imagined that this affection
+would endure throughout my life.
+
+My excessive exclusiveness caused me to treat the others in the class
+with great indifference and haughtiness; still a certain superficial
+self, necessary for social purposes, had already begun to take shallow
+root, and I knew better now how to remain on good terms with them, and
+at the same time to keep my true self hidden from them.
+
+I generally contrived to sit between my two friends, Andre and Paul.
+If, however, we were separated we continually and slyly exchanged notes
+written in a cipher to which we alone had the key.
+
+These letters were always love confidences: "I have seen her to-day; she
+wore a blue dress trimmed with gray fur, and she had a lark's wing on
+her turban, etc."--For we had chosen sweethearts who became the subject
+of our very poetical prattle.
+
+Something of the ridiculous and whimsical invariably marks this
+transition age in a boy's life, and for that reason I have thought it
+worth while to transcribe the boyish note.
+
+Before going further I wish to say that my transition periods have
+lasted longer than do those of the majority of men, and during them I
+have been carried from one extreme to another; and, too they have caused
+me to touch all the perilous rocks along life's way,--I am also fully
+conscious of the fact that until almost my twenty-fifth year I had
+eccentric and absurd manners. . . .
+
+But now I will continue with my confidences respecting our three love
+affairs.
+
+Andre was ardently in love with a young lady almost six years older than
+himself who had already been introduced into society,--I believe that
+his affair was a case of real and deep affection.
+
+I had chosen Jeanne for my sweetheart, and my two friends were the only
+beings who knew my secret. To do as they did, although I considered it a
+little silly, I wrote her name in cipher on the covers of my copy-books;
+in every way and manner I sought to persuade myself of the ardor of
+my passion, but I am bound to admit that the whole thing was a little
+artificial, for the amusing coquetry that Jeanne and I had indulged
+in early in our acquaintance had developed into a true and great
+friendship, a hereditary friendship I may call it, a continuation of
+that felt by our ancestors long before our birth. No, my first real
+love, of which I will soon speak, was for a being seen in a dream.
+
+As for Paul--alas! His heart affair was very shocking to me, for it did
+particular violence to the ideas that I then had. He was in love with
+a little shop-girl who worked in a perfumery store, and on his Sunday
+holidays he gazed at her through the show-case window. It is true that
+she was named Stella or Olympia, and that raised her somewhat in my
+esteem; and, too, Paul took pains to surround his love with an ethereal
+and poetic atmosphere in order to make it more acceptable to us. At the
+bottom of his cipher notes he constantly wrote, for our benefit, the
+sweetest rhymed verses dedicated to her, wherein her name, ending in
+"a," recurred again and again, like the perfume of musk.
+
+In spite of my great affection for him I could not but smile pityingly
+over his poetic effusions. And I think that it is partly because of them
+that I have never, at any epoch in my life, had the least inclination to
+write a single line of verse. My notes were always written in a wild and
+free prose that outraged every rule.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVI.
+
+
+
+Paul knew by heart many verses of a forbidden poet named Alfred de
+Musset. The strange quality of these verses troubled me, and yet I
+was fascinated by them. In class he would whisper them, in a scarcely
+perceptible voice, into my ear; and although my conscience accused me, I
+used to allow him to begin:
+
+     Jacque was very quiet as he looked at Marie,
+     I know not what that sleeping maiden
+     Had of mystery in her features, the noblest ever seen.
+
+In my brother's study, where from time to time, when I was overwhelmed
+with sorrow over his departure, I isolated myself, I had seen on a shelf
+in his book-case a large volume of this poet's works, and often I had
+been tempted to take it down; but my parents had said to me: "You are
+not to touch any of the books that are there without permission from
+us," and my conscience always gave me pause.
+
+As to asking for permission, I knew only too well that my request would
+be refused.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVII.
+
+
+
+I will here recount a dream that I had in my fourteenth year. It came
+to me during one of those mild and sweet nights that are ushered in by a
+long and delicious twilight.
+
+In the room where I had spent all the years of my childhood I had been
+lulled to sleep by the sound of songs that the sailors and young girls
+sang as they danced around the flower-twined May-pole. Until the moment
+of deep sleep I had listened to those very old national airs which the
+children of the people were singing in a loud, free voice, but distance
+softened and mellowed and poetized the voices as they traversed the
+tranquil silence; strangely enough I had been soothed by the noisy mirth
+and overflowing joyousness of these beings who, during their fleeting
+youth, are so much more artless than we, and more oblivious of death.
+
+In my dream it was twilight, not a sad one however, but on the contrary,
+the air was soft and mild and overflowing with sweet odors like that of
+a real May night. I was in the yard of our house, the aspect of which
+was not changed in any particular, but as I walked beside the walls all
+abloom with jasmine, honeysuckle and roses, I felt restless and troubled
+as if I was seeking for some unnamable something; I seemed to have a
+consciousness that someone, whom I wished ardently to see, awaited
+my coming; I felt as if there was about to happen to me something so
+strange and wonderful as to intoxicate me by its very advance.
+
+At a spot where grew a very old rosebush, one that had been planted by
+an ancestor and for that reason guarded sacredly, although it did
+not bear more than one rose in two or three years, I saw a young girl
+standing motionless with a seductive and mysterious smile upon her lips.
+
+The twilight became a little deeper, the air more languorous.
+
+Everywhere it became darker; but about her shone a sort of indeterminate
+light, like that coming from a reflector, and her figure outlined itself
+clearly against the shadows in the background.
+
+I guessed that she was very beautiful and young; but her forehead and
+her eyes were hidden from me by the veil of night; indeed, I could see
+nothing very distinctly except the exquisite oval of her lower face,
+and her mouth which was parted smilingly. She leaned against the old
+flowerless rosebush, almost in its branches. Night came on rapidly. The
+girl seemed perfectly at home in the garden; she had come I knew not
+from where, for there was no door by which she could have entered; she
+appeared to find it as natural to be here as I found it natural to find
+her here.
+
+I drew very close in order to get a glimpse of her eyes which puzzled
+me; suddenly, in spite of the darkness that became ever thicker, I saw
+them very distinctly; they also were smiling like the lips;--and they
+were not just any impersonal eyes, such, for instance, as may be found
+in a statue representing youth; no, on the contrary they were very
+particularly somebody's eyes; more and more they impressed me as
+belonging to someone already much beloved whom I, with transports of
+infinite joy and tenderness had found again.
+
+I waked from sleep with a start, and as I did so I sought to retain the
+phantom being who faded away and became more and more intangible and
+unreal, in proportion as my mind grew clearer through the effort it made
+to remember. Could it be possible that she was not and had never been
+more than a vision? Had nothingness re-engulfed and forever effaced her?
+I longed to sleep again so that I might see her; the thought that she
+was an illusion, nothing more than the figment of a dream, caused me
+great dejection and almost overwhelmed me with hopelessness.
+
+And it took me a very long time to forget her; I loved her, loved her
+tenderly, and the thought of her always stirred into life an emotion
+that was sweet but sad; and during those moments everything unconnected
+with her seemed colorless and worthless. It was love, true love with
+all its great melancholy and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad
+enchantment, love that, like a perfume, endows with a fragrance all it
+touches; and that corner of the garden where she had appeared to me
+and the old flowerless rosebush that had clasped her in its branches
+awakened in me, because of her, agonizing but delicious memories.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVIII.
+
+
+
+And again came radiant June. It was evening, the exquisite hour of
+twilight. I was alone in my brother's study where I had been for some
+time; the window was opened wide to a sky all golden and pink, and I
+stood beside it and listened to the martins uttering their shrill cries
+as they circled and darted above the old roofs.
+
+No one knew that I was there, and never before had I felt so isolated at
+the top of the house, nor more tempted by the unknown.
+
+With a beating heart I opened a volume of De Musset's poems: his Don
+Paez.
+
+The first phrases were as musical and rhythmical as if sung by a
+seductive golden-voiced siren:
+
+     Black eyebrows, snow-white hands, and to indicate the tinyness
+     Of her feet, I need only say she was an Andalusian countess.
+
+That spring night when the darkness fell about me, when my eyes,
+although never so close to the book, could no longer distinguish
+anything of the enchanting verses save rows of little lines that showed
+gray against the white of the page, I went out into the town alone.
+
+In the almost deserted streets, not yet lighted, the rows of linden and
+acacia trees all abloom, deepened the shadows and perfumed the air with
+their heavy fragrance. I pulled my felt hat over my eyes and, like
+Don Paez, I strode along with a light supple step, and looked up at
+balconies and indulged in I know not what little childish dreams of
+Spanish twilights and Andalusian serenades.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIX.
+
+
+
+Vacation came again, and for the third time we took the journey to
+the South, and there in the glorious August and September sunshine all
+passed off in the same fashion as during preceding summers; the
+same games with my loyal band, the expeditions to the vineyards and
+mountains; in the ruins of Castelnau, the same brooding over mediaeval
+times, and, in the sequestered woodland path where we had struck our
+vein of silver, we still eagerly turned up the red soil, putting on
+meantime the airs of bold adventurers,--the little Peyrals, however, no
+longer believed in the mines.
+
+These beginnings of summer, always so alike, deluded me into thinking
+that in spite of my occasional fears my childhood would be indefinitely
+prolonged; but I no longer felt "joy at waking;" a sort of disquietude,
+such as oppresses one when he has left his duty undone, weighed upon me
+more and more heavily each morning when I thought that time was flying,
+that the vacation would soon be over, and that I still lacked the
+courage to come to a decision in regard to my future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXX.
+
+
+
+And one day, when September was more than half over, I realized, because
+of the particularly torturing anxiety I felt when I waked, that I must
+no longer defer the matter--the term which I had allotted to myself was
+over.
+
+In my heart of hearts I had more than half determined what my decision
+was to be; but before it could be rendered effective it was necessary
+for me to avow it, and I promised myself that the day should not pass
+away without my having, as courageously as possible, accomplished that
+task. It was my intention to first confide in my brother; for although
+I feared that in the beginning he would oppose me with all his power, I
+hoped that he would finally take my part and help me carry the day.
+
+Therefore, after the mid-day dinner, when the sun was hottest, I carried
+my pen and paper into my uncle's garden, and I locked myself in there
+for the purpose of writing my letter. It was one of my boyhood habits
+to study or write in the open air, and often I chose the most singular
+places--tree-tops or the roof--for my work.
+
+It was a hot and cloudless September afternoon. The old garden, silent
+and melancholy as ever, gave me, strangely enough, more than the
+customary feeling of regret that I was so far away from my mother, that
+all of summer would pass without my seeing my home and the flowers in
+the beloved little yard. And then, too, what I was upon the point of
+writing would result in separating me farther from all that I loved, and
+for that reason I felt extraordinarily sad. It seemed to me that there
+was something a little funereal in the air of the garden, as if the
+walls, the plum trees, the vine-covered bower, even the very alfalfa
+fields beyond the garden, were vitally interested in this, the first
+grave act of my life which was about to take place under their eyes.
+
+For the purpose of writing I hesitated between two or three places,
+all blazing hot and almost shadeless. It was my way of gaining time, an
+attempt to delay writing that letter which, with the ideas I then had,
+would render my decision, once I had announced it, irrevocable. The
+sun-baked earth was already strewn with red vine branches and withered
+leaves; the holly-hocks and dahlias, grown tall as trees, had a few
+meagre blossoms at the tops of their long stalks; the blazing sun
+perfected and turned to gold the musk-scented grapes that always ripened
+a little late; but in spite of the excessive heat and the exquisite
+limpid blue of the sky one felt that summer was over.
+
+I finally selected the arbor at the end of the garden for my purpose.
+Its vines were stripped of their leaves, but the steel-blue butterflies
+and the wasps still came and posted themselves upon the tendrils of the
+grape-vines.
+
+There in the calm and tranquil solitude, in the summer-like silence
+filled with the musical chirp of insects, I wrote and timidly signed my
+compact with the sea.
+
+Of the letter itself I remember very little; but I recall distinctly
+the emotion with which I enclosed it in its envelope--I felt as if I had
+forever sealed my destiny.
+
+After a few moments of deep reverie I wrote the address--my brother's
+name and the name of a country in the far Orient where he then was--on
+the envelope. There was now nothing more to do save to take it to the
+village post-office; but I remained seated there in the arbor for a long
+time in a dreamy mood. I leaned against the warm wall where the
+lizards ran back and forth, and held upon my knees, with a feeling of
+uncertainty and dismay, the little square of paper wherein I had settled
+my future. Then I was seized with a longing to look towards the horizon,
+to have a glimpse of the great spaces beyond the garden; and I put my
+foot into the familiar breach in the wall by means of which I often
+mounted, in order to watch the flight of elusive butterflies, and, with
+the aid of my hands, I raised myself to the top of the wall and leaned
+there propped up by my elbows. The same well-known prospect greeted me:
+the hillsides covered with red vines, the wooded mountains whose trees
+were rapidly being stripped of their yellow leaves, and above, perched
+high, the noble reddish-brown ruin of Castelnau. And in the nearer
+distance was Bories with its old rounded porch white with lime-wash; and
+as I looked at it I seemed to hear the plaintive refrain: "Ah! Ah! the
+good, good story!" sung in a strange voice, and at the same time there
+appeared to me the vision of the pinkish-yellow butterfly which two
+years before I had pricked with a pin, and placed under glass in my
+little museum.
+
+It drew near the hour for the ancient country diligence, that took the
+letters away from the village, to depart, and I scrambled down from
+the wall, and after locking the garden gate, I slowly directed my steps
+towards the post-office.
+
+Like one with eyes fixed upon a vision, I walked along without taking
+notice of anything or any one. My spirit was wandering far away, in the
+fern-carpeted forests of the delicious isle, along the sands of gloomy
+Senegal where had lived the uncle who had interested himself in my
+museum, and across the South Pacific Ocean where the dolphins were
+passing.
+
+The assured nearness and certainty of these things intoxicated me; for
+the first time in my existence the world and life seemed to open before
+me; my way was illuminated by a light altogether new to it: it is true
+the light was a little mournful, a little sad, but it was powerful
+nevertheless, and penetrated to the far distant horizon where lie old
+age and death.
+
+Many little childish images obtruded themselves from time to time into
+my lofty dream; I saw myself in a sailor's uniform walking upon the
+sun-blistered quays of tropical lands; and I prefigured my home-comings,
+after perilous voyages, bringing with me cases filled to the brim with
+wonderful things out of which cockroaches escaped as they had done
+formerly in Jeanne's garden when her father's boxes were unpacked.
+
+But suddenly a pang went through my heart: those returns from distant
+countries could not take place for many years--the faces welcoming me
+home would be changed by time! Instantly I pictured those beloved faces
+to myself; in a wan vision I saw them all together. Although its members
+received me with smiles of joyous welcome, it was a sad group to look
+upon, for wrinkles seamed every brow, and my mother had white curls such
+as she has to-day. And my great aunt Bertha, already so old, would
+she, too, be there? With a sort of uneasiness, I was rapidly making a
+calculation of my aunt Bertha's age when I arrived at the post-office.
+
+I did not hesitate, however; with a hand that trembled only a little I
+slipped my letter into the box, and the die was cast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXI.
+
+
+
+I will end these reminiscences here, because what follows is not yet
+distant enough from me to be submitted to the unknown reader. And
+besides it seems to me that my childhood really came to an end upon the
+day in which I announced my decision in regard to my future.
+
+I was then fourteen and a half years of age, and that gave me,
+therefore, three years and a half in which to prepare myself for the
+naval academy, consequently I had time to do it thoroughly and properly.
+
+But in the meantime I had to encounter many refusals and all sorts
+of difficulties before my admittance to the Borda. And later I
+lived through many troublous years; years replete with struggles and
+mistakes,--I had many a Calvary to climb; I had to pay cruelly and in
+full for having been reared a sensitive, shy little creature, by force
+of will I had to recast and harden my physical as well as my moral
+being. One day, when I was about twenty-seven years of age, a circus
+director, after having seen my muscles that then had the elasticity
+and strength of steel, gave utterance, in his admiration, to the truest
+words I have ever had addressed to me: "What a pity, sir," he said,
+"that your education commenced so late!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXII.
+
+
+
+My sister and I had expected to visit the mountains again the next
+summer.
+
+But Azrael passed our way; terrible and unexpected misfortunes disrupted
+our tranquil and happy family life.
+
+And it was not until fifteen years later, after I had been over the
+greater part of the earth, that I revisited this corner of France.
+
+All was greatly changed there; my uncle and aunt slept in the graveyard;
+my boy cousins had left, and my girl cousin, who already had threads
+of silver among her dark locks, was preparing to quit this part of the
+country forever, this empty house in which she did not wish to live
+alone; and the Titi and the Marciette (whose names were no longer
+prefaced by the article) had grown into tall young ladies whom I would
+not have recognized.
+
+Between two long voyages, in a hurry as always, my life hastening
+feverishly upon its way, in remembrance of bygone days, I made this
+pilgrimage to my uncle's house to see it once more, and for the last
+time, before it was delivered into the hands of strangers.
+
+It was in November, and the cold gray sky completely changed the aspect
+of the country, which I had never seen before except under the glorious
+summer sun.
+
+After spending my only morning in revisiting a thousand places, my
+melancholy ever augmented by the lowering winter clouds, I found that
+I had forgotten the old garden and the vine-clad arbor in whose meagre
+shade I had come to so momentous a decision, and I wished to run there,
+at the last moment, before my carriage took me away from this spot
+forever.
+
+"You will have to go alone," said my cousin, who was busy packing her
+trunks. She gave me the large key, the same large key that I carried
+in the warm and radiant days of old when I went there, net in hand,
+to catch the butterflies . . . oh! the summers of my childhood, how
+marvellous and how enchanting they were!
+
+For the last time of all, I entered the garden, which under the gray
+sky appeared shrunken to me. I went first to the arbor, now leafless and
+desolate, in which I had written the portentous letter to my brother,
+and, by means of the same breach in the wall that had served me in days
+gone by, I lifted myself to the coping to get a hasty glimpse of the
+surrounding country, to bid it a last farewell. Bories looked singularly
+near and small to me, it was almost unrecognizably so, and the mountains
+beyond seemed diminished also, appeared no higher than little hills. And
+all of these things that formerly I had seen flooded with sunlight, now
+looked dull and sinister in the wan, gray November light, and under the
+dark and wintry clouds. I felt as if with the commencement of nature's
+autumn, my life's autumn had also dawned.
+
+And the world, the world which I had thought so immense and so full of
+wonder and charm the day that I leaned on this same wall, after I had
+made my decision,--the whole wide world, did it not look as faded and
+shrunken to me now as this poor landscape?
+
+And especially Bories, that under the autumnal sky looked like a phantom
+of itself, filled me with the deepest sadness.
+
+As I gazed at it I recalled the pinkish-yellow butterfly still under
+its glass in my museum; it had remained there in the same spot, and had
+preserved its fresh bright hues during the time that I had sailed all
+round the globe. For many years I had not thought of the association
+between the two things; but as soon as I remembered the yellow
+butterfly, which was recalled to my mind by Bories, I heard a small
+voice within me sing over and over, very softly: "Ah! Ah! the good, good
+story!" . . . The little voice was strange and flute-like, but above all
+it was sad, sad enough for tears, sad enough to sing over the tomb where
+lie buried the vanished years and dead summers.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of a Child, by Pierre Loti
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