It is intense,
terrible, it rends your heart and upsets your mind; but one is healed of
these shocks, just as large bleeding wounds become healed. Certain
meetings, certain things half perceived, or surmised, certain secret
sorrows, certain tricks of fate which awake in us a whole world of
painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose to us the mysterious door of
moral suffering, complicated, incurable; all the deeper because they
appear benign, all the more bitter because they are intangible, all the
more tenacious because they appear almost factitious, leave in our souls
a sort of trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a feeling of
disenchantment, from which it takes a long time to free ourselves.

I have always present to my mind two or three things that others would
surely not have noticed, but which penetrated my being like fine, sharp
incurable stings.

You might not perhaps understand the emotion that I retained from these
hasty impressions. I will tell you one of them. She was very old, but as
lively as a young girl. It may be that my imagination alone is
responsible for my emotion.

I am fifty. I was young then and studying law. I was rather sad, somewhat
of a dreamer, full of a pessimistic philosophy and did not care much for
noisy cafes, boisterous companions, or stupid girls. I rose early and one
of my chief enjoyments was to walk alone about eight o'clock in the
morning in the nursery garden of the Luxembourg.

You people never knew that nursery garden. It was like a forgotten garden
of the last century, as pretty as the gentle smile of an old lady. Thick
hedges divided the narrow regular paths,--peaceful paths between two
walls of carefully trimmed foliage. The gardener's great shears were
pruning unceasingly these leafy partitions, and here and there one came
across beds of flowers, lines of little trees looking like schoolboys out
for a walk, companies of magnificent rose bushes, or regiments of fruit
trees.

An entire corner of this charming spot was in habited by bees. Their
straw hives skillfully arranged at distances on boards had their
entrances--as large as the opening of a thimble--turned towards
the sun, and all along the paths one encountered these humming and gilded
flies, the true masters of this peaceful spot, the real promenaders of
these quiet paths.

I came there almost every morning. I sat down on a bench and read.
Sometimes I let my book fall on my knees, to dream, to listen to the