O present hour, magnificent, foaming fountain, you know very well that
we shall be faithful to you! With your thousand animated faces, your
landscapes, your problems, your combats and that heavy burden of
jostling ideas you carry with you, you will always attract us, you will
see us all together drinking of your waters.
But when you no longer contain for us anything but anger and hatred,
greed and cruelty, then indeed we must each of us abandon you and turn
to our refuges; we must each of us withdraw into the Thebaid where all
things still respond to our voice, to our voice alone.
May our fate preserve us from the greatest of all misfortunes! May our
refuges never lose in our eyes their virtue and their security! This
supreme affliction at times befalls us, and it is then that our souls,
exiled from their homeland, must set themselves humbly to the search
for the lost grace.
VIII
THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES
I
What man, tell me, what man, were he suddenly delivered from disgust
with himself, from terror of the world, from the sadness of an age that
is without pity, from remorse for a thing he has done, from the fear
of things he has to do, what man, suffering from one of these evils,
or from several of them or from all at once, would not experience an
immense relief, would not feel a certain absolution for the errors of
the universe, a certain alleviation of his own in the contemplation of
this little osier-bed which I descry this evening, at the turning of a
lane?
What is there so profound, so divine in that scene?
Nothing, nothing, no doubt. Everything, perhaps. For who would venture
to maintain that there is anything in the world that might not be a
sign for my heart and yet be nothing more? I was following a stone
wall, an indecipherable wall at present, without significance, without
compassion, an enemy. It shut in my view and my thoughts, it was
covered with cold mosses and all the dampness of winter. And then, all
at once, the wall ended and there was a little valley crowned with
these osiers. Yes, I mean crowned, for it seemed as if all its desires
had been granted, all its aspirations satisfied, all its prayers
fulfilled.
Thousands of crimson branches rose in a chorus toward heaven, like
clusters of some smooth, straight, up-springing coral. All the branches
rose together, with one brotherly impulse, like the desires of a world
freed from ambitions and vowed to the one, the noblest ambition of
all. But why seek for words, why strive to paint it? Surely it was not
the flaming sap of the young shoots any more than the little rivulets
smoking like censers at their feet,--it was neither of these things
that promised relief and deliverance. It was the entire world that
manifested itself in this, its smallest fragment, just as the most
secretive man will betray himself by the trembling of his little finger
or the flutter of an eyelash.