ou what they are;
they may perhaps prove useful to you.

Oh! the first is very simple; it consists in sitting down before my
fire in a low armchair made soft for my old bones, and looking back at
the things that have been put aside.

One life is so short, especially a life entirely spent in the same
spot:

"To be born, to live, and die in the same house."

The things that bring back the past to our recollection are heaped,
pressed together; and, we are old, it sometimes seems no more than ten
days since we were young. Yes; everything slips away from us, as if
life itself were but a single day: morning, evening, and then comes
night--a night without a dawn!

When I gaze into the fire, for hours and hours, the past rises up
before me as though it were but yesterday. I no longer think of my
present existence; reverie carries me away; once more I pass through
all the changes of my life.

And I often am possessed by the illusion that I am a young girl, so
many breaths of bygone days are wafted back to me, so many youthful
sensations and even impulses, so many throbbings of my young
heart--all the passionate ardor of eighteen; and I have clear, as
fresh realities, visions of forgotten things. Oh! how vividly, above
all, do the memories of my walks as a young girl come back to me!
There, in the armchair of mine, before the fire, I saw once more, a
few nights since, a sunset on Mont Saint-Michel, and immediately
afterwards I was riding on horseback through the forest of Uville with
the odors of the damp sand and of the flowers steeped in dew, and the
evening star sending its burning reflection through the water and
bathing my face in its rays as I galloped through the copse. And all I
thought of then, my poetic enthusiasm at the sight of the boundless
sea, my keen delight at the rustling of the branches as I passed, my
most trivial impressions, every fragment of thought, desire, or
feeling, all, all came back to me as if I were there still, as if
fifty years had not glided by since then, to chill my blood and
moderate my hopes. But my other way of reviving the long ago is much
better.

You know, or you do not know, my dear Colette, that we destroy nothing
in the house. We have upstairs, under the roof, a large room for
cast-off things which we call "the lumber-room." Everything which is
no longer used is thrown there. I often go up there, and gaze around
me. Then I find once more a heap of nothings that I had ceased t