have known some which are dead. The sad
clothes of our departed wear out quickly. They are often impregnated
with the same disease as those who wore them. They are one with them.

I have often considered objects which were wasting away. Their
disintegration is identical with our own. They have their decay, their
ruptures, their tumors, their madnesses. A piece of furniture gnawed
by worms, a gun with a broken trigger, a warped drawer, or the soul of
a violin suddenly out of tune, such are the ills which move me.

When we become attached to things why do we believe that love is in us
alone, and afterwards regard it as something external to us? Who can
prove that things are incapable of affection, or who can demonstrate
their unconsciousness? Was not that sculptor right who was buried
holding in his hand a lump of the same clay that had obeyed his dream?
Did it not have the devotion of a faithful servant; did it not have a
quality which we should admire all the more, because it had the virtue
of devoting itself in silence, without selfish interest, and with the
passiveness of faith?

Is there not something sublime and radiant in the thing that acts
toward man, even as man acts toward God? Does the poet know any more
what impulse he obeys, than does the clay? From the moment when
they have both proved their inspiration, I believe equally in their
consciousness, and I love both with the same love.

The sadness which disengages from things that have fallen into disuse
is infinite. In the attic of this house whose inhabitants I did not
know, a little girl's dress and her doll lie desolate. And here is an
iron-pointed staff which once bit into the earth of the green
hills, and a sunbonnet now barely visible in the dim light from the
garret-window. They have been abandoned since many years, and I am
wholly certain that they would be happy again to enjoy, the one the
freshness of the moss, and the other the summer sky.

Things tenderly cared for show their gratitude to us, and are ever
ready to offer us their soul when once we have refreshed it. They are
like those roses of the desert which expand infinitely when a little
water brings back to their memory the azure of lost wells.

In my modest drawing-room there is a child's chair. My father played
with it during his passage from Guadeloupe to France when he was
_seven_ years old. He remembered distinctly that he sat on it in the
ship's saloon, and looked at pictures which