my part, I do not look down
from heights, whence all seems confused and blurred,--the man who
prunes a tree with his knife, all one with the caterpillar who
devours its leaf; a couple of insects, each at his proper task. Do
you, if you choose, perch yourself on the epicycle of the planet
Mercury, and thence distribute creation, in imitation, of Reaumur;
he, the classes of flies into seamstresses, surveyors, reapers;
you, the human species into joiners, dancers, singers, tilers. That
is your affair, and I will not meddle with it. I am in this world,
and in this world I rest. But if it is in nature to have an
appetite--for it is always to appetite that I come back, and to the
sensation that is ever present to me--then I find that it is by no
means consistent with good order not to have always something to
eat. What a precious economy of things! Men who are over-crammed
with everything under the sun, while others, who have a stomach
just as importunate as they, a hunger that recurs as regularly as
theirs, have not a bite. The worst is the constrained posture to
which want pins us down. The needy man does not walk like anybody
else; he jumps, he crawls, he wriggles, he limps, he passes his
whole life in taking and executing artificial postures.

_I._--What are postures?

_He._--Ask Noverre.[226] The world offers far more of them than his
art can imitate.

[226] A famous dancing-master of the time.

_I._--Ah, there are you too--to use your expression or
Montaigne's--_perched on the epicycle of Mercury_, and eyeing the
various pantomimes of the human race.

_He._--No, no, I tell you; I'm too heavy to raise myself so high.
No sojourn in the fogs for me. I look about me, and I assume my
postures, or I amuse myself with the postures that I see others
taking. I am an excellent pantomime as you shall judge.

* * * * *

[Then he set himself to smile, to imitate the admirer, the
suppliant, the fawning complaisant; he expects a command, receives
it, starts off like an arrow, returns, the order is executed, he
reports what he has done; he is attentive to everything; he picks
up something that has fallen; he places a pillow or a footstool; he
holds a saucer; he brings a chair, opens a door, closes a window,
dra