e marionettes without bodies at all, and which would
slip to the ground of themselves were they not kept together midway,
about where a waist should be, by the wide silken sashes--a very
different comprehension of the art of dressing to ours, which endeavors
as much as possible to bring into relief the curves, real or false, of
the figure.

And then, how much I admire the flowers in our vases, arranged by
Chrysantheme, with her Japanese taste lotus-flowers, great, sacred
flowers of a tender, veined rose color, the milky rose-tint seen on
porcelain; they resemble, when in full bloom, great water-lilies, and
when only in bud might be taken for long pale tulips. Their soft but
rather cloying scent is added to that other indefinable odor of mousmes,
of yellow race, of Japan, which is always and everywhere in the air. The
late flowers of September, at this season very rare and expensive, grow
on longer stems than the summer blooms; Chrysantheme has left them in
their large aquatic leaves of a melancholy seaweed-green, and mingled
with them tall, slight rushes. I look at them, and recall with some
irony those great round bunches in the shape of cauliflowers, which our
florists sell in France, wrapped in white lace-paper!

Still no letters from Europe, from any one. How things change, become
effaced and forgotten! Here am I, accommodating myself to this finical
Japan and dwindling down to its affected mannerism; I feel that
my thoughts run in smaller grooves, my tastes incline to smaller
things-things which suggest nothing greater than a smile. I am becoming
used to tiny and ingenious furniture, to doll-like desks, to miniature
bowls with which to play at dinner, to the immaculate monotony of the
mats, to the finely finished simplicity of the white woodwork. I am even
losing my Western prejudices; all my preconceived ideas are this evening
evaporating and vanishing; crossing the garden I have courteously
saluted M. Sucre, who was watering his dwarf shrubs and his deformed
flowers; and Madame Prune appears to me a highly respectable old lady,
in whose past there is nothing to criticise.

We shall take no walk to-night; my only wish is to remain stretched out
where I am, listening to the music of my mousme's 'chamecen'.

Till now I have always used the word guitar, to avoid exotic terms,
for the abuse of which I have been so reproached. But neither the word
guitar nor mandolin suffices to designate this slender instrument wit