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THE Louvre, as you know, is a museum where beautiful things and ancient
things are kept safe--and this is wisely done, for old age and beauty
are both alike venerable. Among the most touching of the antiquities
treasured in the Louvre Museum is a fragment of marble, worn and cracked
in many places, but on which can still be clearly made out two maidens
holding each a flower in her hand. Both are beautiful figures; they were
young when Greece was young. They say it was the age of perfect beauty.
The sculptor who has left us their image represents them in profile,
offering each other one of those lotus flowers that were deemed sacred.
In the blue cups of their blossoms the world quaffed oblivion of the
ills of life. Our men of learning have given much thought to these two
maidens. They have turned over many books to find out about them, big
books, bound some in parchment, others in vellum, and many in pig-skin;
but they have never fathomed the reason why the two beautiful maidens
hold up a flower in their hands.
What they could not discover after so much labour and thought, so
many arduous days and sleepless nights, Mademoiselle Suzanne knew in a
moment.
Her papa had taken her to the Louvre, where he had business.
Mademoiselle Suzanne looked wonderingly at the antiques, and seeing gods
with missing arms and legs and heads, she said to herself: “Ah! yes,
these are the grown-up gentlemen’s dolls; I see now gentlemen break
their dollies the same as little girls do.” But when she came to the two
maidens who, each of them, hold a flower, she threw them a kiss, because
they looked so charming. Then her father asked her: “Why do they give
each other a flower?” And Suzanne answered at once: “To wish each other
a happy birthday.” Then, after thinking a moment, she added:
“They have the same birthday; they are both alike and they are offering
each other the same flower. Girl friends should always have the same
birthday.”
Now Suzanne is far away from the Louvre and the old Greek marbles; she
is in the kingdom of the birds and the flowers. She is spending the
bright spring days in the meadows under shelter of the woods. She plays
in the grass, and that is the sweetest sort of play. She remembers
to-day is her little friend Jacqueline’s birthday; and so she is going
to pick flowers which she will give Jacqueline, and kiss her.