ating on the wave!--ah! who would
not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence
comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads
without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more
imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like fortune,
by the hair when it comes.

Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was
galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I
looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild
imagination was urging me to undertake, a pretty cry, the cry of a woman
issuing refreshed and joyous from a bath, rose above the murmur of the
rippling fringes as their flux and reflux marked a white line along the
shore. Hearing that note as it gushed from a soul, I fancied I saw among
the rocks the foot of an angel, who with outspread wings cried out to
me, "Thou shalt succeed!" I came down radiant, light-hearted; I bounded
like a pebble rolling down a rapid slope. When she saw me, she said,--

"What is it?"

I did not answer; my eyes were moist. The night before, Pauline had
understood my sorrows, as she now understood my joy, with the magical
sensitiveness of a harp that obeys the variations of the atmosphere.
Human life has glorious moments. Together we walked in silence along
the beach. The sky was cloudless, the sea without a ripple; others might
have thought them merely two blue surfaces, the one above the other, but
we--we who heard without the need of words, we who could evoke between
these two infinitudes the illusions that nourish youth,--we pressed each
other's hands at every change in the sheet of water or the sheets of
air, for we took those slight phenomena as the visible translation of
our double thought. Who has never tasted in wedded love that moment of
illimitable joy when the soul seems freed from the trammels of flesh,
and finds itself restored, as it were, to the world whence it came?
Are there not hours when feelings clasp each other and fly upward, like
children taking hands and running, they scarce know why? It was thus we
went along.

At the moment when the village roofs began to show like a faint gray
line on the horizon, we met a fisherman, a poor man returning to
Croisic. His feet were bare; his linen trousers ragged round the bottom;
his shirt of common sailcloth, and his jacket tatters. This abject
poverty pained us; it was like a discord amid our harmo