ative drinks, and seem entirely
in their element. They take their pleasure as the blacksmith forges, as
the cascade tumbles over the rocks, as the colts frisk in the meadows.
It is contagious: it stirs your heart. In spite of yourself you are
ready to cry: "Bravo, my children. That is fine!" You want to join in.
In the other case, you see villagers disguised as city folk,
countrywomen made hideous by the modiste, and, as the chief ornament of
the festival, a lot of degenerates who bawl the songs of music halls;
and sometimes in the place of honor, a group of tenth-rate barnstormers,
imported for the occasion, to civilize these rustics and give them a
taste of refined pleasures. For drinks, liquors mixed with brandy or
absinthe: in the whole thing neither originality nor picturesqueness.
License, indeed, and clownishness, but not that _abandon_ which
ingenuous joy brings in its train.

* * * * *

This question of pleasure is capital. Staid people generally neglect it
as a frivolity; utilitarians, as a costly superfluity. Those whom we
designate as pleasure-seekers forage in this delicate domain like wild
boars in a garden. No one seems to doubt the immense human interest
attached to joy. It is a sacred flame that must be fed, and that throws
a splendid radiance over life. He who takes pains to foster it
accomplishes a work as profitable for humanity as he who builds bridges,
pierces tunnels, or cultivates the ground. So to order one's life as to
keep, amid toils and suffering, the faculty of happiness, and be able to
propagate it in a sort of salutary contagion among one's fellow-men, is
to do a work of fraternity in the noblest sense. To give a trifling
pleasure, smooth an anxious brow, bring a little light into dark
paths--what a truly divine office in the midst of this poor humanity!
But it is only in great simplicity of heart that one succeeds in
filling it.

We are not simple enough to be happy and to render others so. We lack
the singleness of heart and the self-forgetfulness. We spread joy, as we
do consolation, by such methods as to obtain negative results. To
console a person, what do we do? We set to work to dispute his
suffering, persuade him that he is mistaken in thinking himself unhappy.
In reality, our language translated into truthful speech would amount to
this: "You suffer, my friend? That is strange; you must be mistaken, for
I feel nothing." As the only human means of soothi