On my Thursday holidays during the winter, after having finished
my duties and accomplished all my school tasks, I felt the greatest
homesickness when I mounted to my museum. It was always a little late
when I finished my lessons, and the light was usually fading when I
looked down at the great meadows that appeared inexpressibly melancholy
as they stretched before me enwrapped in a grayish-pink mist. I was
homesick for the summer, homesick for the sun and the south, all of
which were suggested by the butterflies from my uncle's garden that I
had arranged and pinned under glass, and by the mountain fossils that
the little Peyrals and I had collected in the summer time.
It was a foretaste of that longing for somewhere else which later, after
my return from long voyages to tropical countries, spoiled my visits to
my home.
Oh! there was in particular the pinkish-yellow butterfly! There were
times when I experienced a bitter pleasure in seeking to understand the
great sadness that it caused me. It was in the glass case at the far
end of the room; its two colors so fresh and unusual, like a Chinese
painting, or a fairy's robe, were exquisite foils for each other; the
butterfly formed a luminous whole that shone out brightly in the gray
twilight, and it caused the other butterflies surrounding it to look as
dull as dun-colored little bats.
As soon as my eyes rested upon it I seemed to hear drawled out lazily,
in a mountaineer's treble, the refrain: “Ah! ah! the good, good story!”
And again I saw the white porch of Bories in the midst of the silence
and the hot sunshine of a summer noon. A deep regret for past and
gone vacations took possession of me; I felt saddened when I tried to
recreate days belonging to a dead past, and tried to imagine vacations
still to come; but mingled in with sentiments that I can name, there
were those other inexpressible ones that well up from the unfathomable
deeps of one's being.
This association between the butterfly, the song and Bories caused me
for a long time an extreme sadness that, try as hard as I may, I cannot
explain satisfactorily; and the feeling continued until stormy and
tempestuous winds swept over my life and carried away with them the
small concerns belonging to my childhood.
Sometimes, upon gray winters evenings, when I looked at the butterfly
I would sing to myself the little refrain of the “good, good story;” to
accomplish this I had to make my voice very flute-like; and as I sang,
the porch of Bories appeared to me more vividly than ever, as it stood,
sunny but desolate, under the dazzling light of the September noon. This
association was a little like the one that later established itself for
me between the sad falsetto of the Arab songs, the snowy splendor of
their mosques and the winding-sheet whiteness of their lime-washed
porticos.
That butterfly in all the freshness and radiance of its two strange
colors, mummified, it is true, but as brilliant looking as ever under
its glass, retains for me a sort of old-time charm which I cherish. The
little St. Hermangardes, whom I have not seen for many years, and who
are now attached to an embassy somewhere in the Orient, would
doubtless, should they read this, be much astonished to learn what value
circumstances has given to their little present.