We shall seek together the materials of our happiness. Together we
shall pile up all those marvelous little things that must constitute
our patrimony, our wealth.
We shall have great misfortunes and we shall often be bitterly
deceived. It is because the war has succeeded in depriving the simplest
and the most sacred things of the light of eternity. That is not the
least consequence of the catastrophe. We must make a painful effort to
recover that light and clear it of its blemishes. Silence, solitude,
the sky, the vestiture of the earth, all the riches of the poor have
been sullied as if forever. The works of art have been mutilated. They
have taken refuge under the earth where they seem to veil their faces.
We ought to seek and gather together the debris so that we can take up
and love in secret every day the fragments of our liberties.
We ought to think unceasingly of that “mean landscape” of which Charles
Vildrac has spoken in one of his most beautiful poems. It is an
unfruitful landscape, despoiled, denatured by the sad labor of men, and
apparently worn out;--
But even so you found, if you sought there,
One happy spot where the grass grew rich,
Even so you heard, if you listened,
The whisper of leaves
And the birds pursuing one another.
And if you had enough love,
You could even ask of the wind
Perfumes and music ...
We shall have enough love! That shall be the principle and source of
our wealth.
And so we shall not have a whole life of poverty. When love, that is to
say, grace, abandons us, we shall perhaps know hours of poverty. That
will help us all the better to understand our hours of opulence, and
all the better cherish them.