THE YOUNG HARVEST-GIRL
I toil and hope. I pass the days seated at my little table, putting
aside my pen for long hours to caress some ideal blonde whom the ink
would soil. Then, I resume my work, decking my heroines with the rays of
my dreams. I forget the snow and the empty closet. I live I know not
where, perhaps in a cloud, perhaps amid the down of an abandoned nest.
When I write a phrase sprucely and coquettishly draped, I imagine I see
angels and hawthorns in bloom.
I have the holy gayety of toil. Ah! how foolish I was to be sad, and how
deceived I was in thinking myself poor and alone! Yesterday my chamber
was hideous; now it smiles upon me. I feel around me friends whom I
cannot see, but who are legion and who all put out their hands to me. So
great is their number that they hide from me the walls of my den.
Poor little table, when Despair shall touch me with her wing, I will
always seat myself before you and bend over the white paper on which my
dream fixes itself only after having given me a smile.
Alas! I must have, nevertheless, a shade of reality. I surprise myself
sometimes uneasy, wishing for a joy that I cannot shape. Then, I hear
something like a complaint from my heart: it tells me that it is always
cold, always famished, and that a mad dream can neither warm nor satisfy
it. I wish to content it. I will go out to-morrow, no longer isolating
myself in myself, but gazing at the windows, telling it to make its
choice from among the beautiful ladies. Then, from time to time, I will
take it back beneath the chosen balcony. It will carry away from it a
glance to feed on, and, for a week, will no longer feel the winter. When
again it shall cry famine, a new smile shall appease it.
Brothers, have you never imagined that, on a certain autumn evening, you
met amid the grain fields a brunette of sixteen? She smiled upon you as
she flitted by, then was lost among the wheat heads. That night you
dreamed of her, and, on the morrow, at the same hour, took the path from
the town. The dear vision passed, smiled again, leaving you a new dream
for your next sleep. Months, years elapsed. Every day your famished
heart was satisfied with a smile and never desired more. An entire
lifetime would not be long enough for you to exhaust the glance of the
young harvest-girl.