I had escorted to the Cimetiere de Marnes that day a very aged colleague of mine who, to use the words of Goethe, had consented to die.The great Goethe, whose own vital force was something extraordinary, actually believed that one never dies until one really wants to die--that is to say, when all those energies which resist dissolution, and teh sum of which make up life itself, have been totally destroyed.In other words, he believed that people only die when it is no longer possible for them to live.Good! it is merely a question of properly understanding one another; and when fully comprehended, the magnificent idea of Goethe only brings us quietly back to the song of La Palisse.
Well, my excellent colleague had consented to die--thanks to several successive attacks of extremely persuasive apoplexy--the last of which proved unanswerable.I had been very little acquainted with him during his lifetime; but it seems that I became his friend the moment he was dead, for our colleagues assured me in a most serious manner, with deeply sympathetic countenances, that I should act as one of the pall-bearers, and deliver an address over the tomb.
After having read very badly a short address I had written as well as I could--which is not saying much for it--I started out for a walk in the woods of Ville-d'Avray, and followed, without leaning too much on the Captain's cane, a shaded path on which the sunlight fell, through foliage, in little discs of gold.Never had the scent of grass and fresh leaves,--never had the beauty of the sky over the trees, and the serene might of noble tree contours, so deeply affected my senses and all my being; and the pleasure I felt in that silence, broken only by faintest tinkling sounds, was at once of the senses and of the soul.
I sat down in the shade of the roadside under a clump of young oaks.
And there I made a promise to myself not to die, or at least not to consent to die, before I should be again able to sit down under and oak, where--in the great peace of the open country--I could meditate on the nature of the soul and the ultimate destiny of man.
A bee, whose brown breast-plate gleamed in the sun like armour of old gold, came to light upon a mallow-flower close by me--darkly rich in colour, and fully opened upon its tufted stalk.It was certainly not the first time I had witnessed so common an incident;but it was the first time that I had watched it with such comprehensive and friendly curiosity.I could discern that there were all sorts of sympathies between the insect and the flower--a thousand singular little relationships which I had never before even suspected.
Satiated with nectar, the insect rose and buzzed away in a straight line, while I lifted myself up as best I could, and readjusted myself upon my legs.
"Adieu!" I said to the flower and to the bee."Adieu! Heaven grant I may live long enough to discover the secret of your harmonies.Iam very tired.But man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labour by taking up another.The flowers and insects will give me that relaxation, with God's will, after my long researches in philology and diplomatics.How full of meaning is that old myth of Antaeus! I have touched the Earth and I am a new man; and now at seventy years of age, new feelings of curiosity take birth in my mind, even as young shoots sometimes spring up from the hollow trunk of an aged oak!"June 4.
I like to look out of my window at the Seine and its quays on those soft grey mornings which give such an infinite tenderness of tint to everything.I have seen that azure sky which flings so luminous a calm over the Bay of Naples.But our Parisian sky is more animated, more kindly, more spiritual.It smiles, threatens, caresses--takes an aspect of melancholy or a look of merriment like a human gaze.At this moment it is pouring down a very gentle light on the men and beasts of the city as they accomplish their daily tasks.Over there, on the opposite bank, the stevedores of the Port Saint-Nicholas are unloading a cargo of cow's horns;while two men standing on a gangway are tossing sugar-loaves from one to the other, and thence to somebody in the hold of a steamer.
On the north quay, the cab-horses, standing in a line under the shade of the plane-trees each with its head in a nose-bag, are quietly munching their oats, while the rubicund drivers are drinking at the counter of the wine-seller opposite, but all the while keeping a sharp lookout for early customers.
The dealers in second-hand books put their boxes on the parapet.
These good retailers of Mind, who are always in the open air, with blouses loose to the breeze, have become so weatherbeaten by the wind, the rain, the frost, the snow, the fog, and the great sun, that they end by looking very much like the old statues of cathedrals.They are all friends of mine, and I scarcely ever pass by their boxes without picking out of one of them some old book which I had always been in need of up to that very moment, without any suspicion of the fact on my part.
Then on my return home I have to endure the outcries of my housekeeper, who accuses me of bursting all my pockets and filling the house with waste paper to attract the rats.Therese is wise about that, and it is because she is wise that I do not listen to her; for in spite of my tranquil mien, I have always preferred the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference.But just because my own passions are not of that sort which burst out with violence to devastate and kill, the common mind is not aware of their existence.Nevertheless, I am greatly moved by them at times, and it has more than once been my fate to lose my sleep for the sake of a few pages written by some forgotten monk or printed by some humble apprentice of Peter Schaeffer.And if these fierce enthusiasms are slowly being quenched in me, it is only because I am being slowly quenched myself.Our passions are ourselves.
My old books are Me.I am just as old and thumb-worn as they are.
