Chapter X: On the Reign of the Heart 178 (2)

My comrades, my comrades, if the uncertainty of your spirit, your agony, the rebelliousness of your afflicted flesh urges you to seek those who are responsible, do not look too angrily upon those who are about you, do not, in your aberration, accuse Houtelette because he is a chatterbox, Exmelin because he is an egoist, or Blèche because he is a rude, morose commander. Do not place your misery to the account of Méry, who is so slow in obeying, and be willing to admit that Maurin is not to blame for everything because his opinions are not the same as yours. At least, if you must draw your circle of animosity, make it so close about you that it contains only yourselves, and seek first of all in yourselves the causes of your unhappiness.

Better still, apply yourselves to looking your suffering in the face, putting it, with insight and precision, to the proof.

You know that a loathsome drink almost ceases to be loathsome when you drink it without haste but with a desire to appreciate the precise quality of its bitterness. Exactly in this same manner you should endeavor to measure, to study your suffering. Instead of abhorring it, try in a way to understand it; it will become interesting, curious, I dare not say lovable.

If Méry carries out your orders badly, consider systematically how he can be made to become, in spite of himself, a really good servant. If Blèche exercises his authority in a way that incessantly wounds you, interest yourself in his brutality, try to analyze his movements, his expressions, his familiar habits, and you will then be in a better position, not to escape from him indeed, but to avoid at times the sting, the cut of his peremptoriness. You will make him restless by doing this, and you will set him thinking. It is not necessary for him to fear you, it is enough for him to recognize in you a free force with which he has to reckon, a force it is wise to propitiate. Meanwhile, to use a colloquialism, “you’ve got him.” Every time you have obliged him to be less arrogant, more just with you, you can say that you have “had” him, as the soldiers so admirably put it.

This possession costs a certain amount of work. But you are willing to toil eight hours in order to earn ten francs that do not remain for a single day between your fingers; you can certainly afford a few minutes of your effort and your soul to acquire a treasure of which nothing will ever be able to deprive you.

IV

The very rich man owns several estates. There is always one that he prefers, that he frequents and cultivates by choice. There are others where he goes only from time to time, at the solicitation of some state of his soul which inclines him to seek, for a period, the mountains, or the ocean, or the open country. There are some, finally, which he does not love at all but of which, nevertheless, he will not dispossess himself because they are part of his fortune.

It is so with you who possess a family, friends, comrades, and adversaries. It is so with you who are able to draw, without let or hindrance, from the immense well of humankind. You must refuse nothing; you must accept everything, find out the value of everything, store everything away. The world of men is a rich patrimony, the exploitation of which is expressly confided to you. You must not be a bad administrator, you must make all your land bring forth its fruit.

Choose every day what is necessary to you, for you are the master.

You must know, besides, how to accept the inevitable and take chances, for you are nothing but a man.

Construct a scale, a clear, harmonious keyboard. Like an organist you must know the right moment to pull the stop of the oboe and unloose the thunder of the bass. The pipes are not at fault: it is for you to become a good musician. The face of Guillaumin suits you in the morning, and his ideas rejuvenate you like fresh water. The eloquence of Maurin is like a tonic in your hours of recreation. But there are desolate evenings when what you undoubtedly need is the deep voice of Cauchois and his affectionate silence.

V

In spite of the legendary ages, in spite of the religions, in spite of the poets, in spite of the marvelous traditions and, above all, in spite of our own deepest aspirations, we must unquestionably abandon the hope of an occult correspondence between souls.

It is a renunciation that it is hard to admit. Every day events envelop us that seem to revive the vanished perfume of mystery. Our reason is in no haste to dissipate these clouds, to pierce these appearances: too well they soothe the irritating need of not being quite solitary in the interior of ourselves, of not being quite exiles in an inaccessible desert.

That nothing outside our senses can reveal to us the proximity of a beloved person, the danger that is approaching him, the death that is coming to clasp him, is an extremity to which we find ourselves reduced without ever submissively making up our minds to it.

A few courageous men have halted before this mountain and undertaken to lift it. Let us leave them toiling in the shadow; let us aid them, if not by our effort, at least by our silence, and wait.

Let us wait, but let us not cease to go forth to other battles. The unknown never fails us. And as for what we shall choose, there is so much in the unknown to allure us, to enchant us! If we give up surmounting one obstacle another will always rise before our feet. From obstacle to obstacle we shall always be led to the foot of the same wall. We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.

Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock, a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with bitterness. Happily, the unknown is always there.

I find myself alone with the person who of all the world is the closest to me, the best loved, the most perfectly chosen. The silence exhales a light perfume, a unique perfume that seems that of our kindred souls. Oh! how we should like to believe that the essences of our beings, delivered at last, might communicate and unite with each other in the intermediate space, in the impassable abyss!

At this very moment we surprise in one another’s eyes a common thought. Simultaneously, it escapes our lips with a sort of rapturous precipitancy, as if we were afraid of not arriving at exactly the same moment at the _rendez-vous_, as if we wished, with the harmonious precision of a well-rehearsed duet, to confess together some matchless certainty.

We are happy, filled with astonishment.... But I am not deceived.

I do not yet hold it, palpitating, for good and all, between my fingers, the proof that has been so long sought for. Not yet, this day, have I met face to face either God or the immortal soul.

Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us, the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,--that it is one of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes, we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to make us vibrate in harmony.

But there must be the touch of the bow, there must be the perfume, so faint that one experiences its suggestions without being sure of its presence; perhaps there is necessary only one of those obscure phenomena which pass the limit of our senses in the twilight where our inadequate organs can only gropingly divine the world.

This is our meager certainty. Very well! Let us not reject it in our spite; for it has its depth, its beauty. We must make it our own, force it to enrich us.

Where the exercise of the intelligence seems to result in the fatal imprisonment of the soul within itself, love enables us to see how the soul can reach beyond its own limits into time and space. In vain does the intelligence prove to us that all this is only an illusion. That illusion is beautiful; let us make up our minds to give it shape. Through its very longings to escape from its confines, the soul may perhaps succeed in breaking them, and it is to love without a doubt that it will owe the miracle of its deliverance.

We possess only an imperfect means of communion. So be it! Let us labor tenderly to perfect that means. It is thus that the creators of science and industry labor, and we must admit that their stubbornness has succeeded in making a very great evil out of a small one. Let us not be less ingenious! This sinister progress ought to give us encouragement: moral civilization deserves as much care as the other sort.

With our brothers, our wives, our friends, let us freely seek to have so many things in common, let us strive so passionately to understand one another, that our thoughts, ceaselessly pressing toward this goal, may continually experience the sense of infinity and eternity.

There lies our path; if it urges us to possess the largest portion we can of the human world, let us first begin by intimately possessing what we love. This possession I am sure is the only real one. They knew it very well, those desperate men who have loved fiercely the mere bodies of women without ever receiving the real gift that can be yielded in a glance, from a distance, with the swiftness of lightning.

VI

There are men who set out from their homes in the morning in the pursuit of wealth. They walk with their eyes on the pavement, they fling themselves furiously into all sorts of petty labors. They dream of lost money, princely gifts, scandalous inheritances, lotteries. They think of gold as of an inaccessible woman whom they can strike down and ravish in a corner. They return home in the evening worn out, exasperated, famished, as poor as ever. They have not even seen the face of the man who sat next them in the subway. That face itself was a fortune.

Do you seek out your friend because, on occasion, he can lend you the sum you foresee you are going to need, because he can speak to some cabinet official on your behalf, because he is a jovial host? If that is the case, you are a slave, you possess nothing. Do you, on the contrary, love him for that way of smiling he has that so delights you, for the candor and tenderness his hesitating voice betrays, his gift of tears and his stormy repentances? If this is so, you are very rich: that man is yours and he is a treasure worth having.

Can you recall the use you made of your first five-franc piece? Most assuredly not! But you will never forget a certain expression which, in your eyes, distorted or made more beautiful some well-loved face when you were a little child. That has, and always will have, a place among your treasures: that day you really learned something of importance, and you have never ceased since to recall the victory and turn it to account.

If you have little inclination to squander your fortune, what is to prevent you from assembling it under one title-deed? A single face, a single soul, is yet an inestimable estate. One may believe one has exhausted all one’s resources, but one is always deceived, for like the earth, the human landscape is always perpetually laboring and bears fruit every season.

The peasant who possesses only an acre is full of pride nevertheless, for he knows that his possession goes down to the very center of the earth.

For many years I have watched the same face, like the faithful horizon stretched across the aperture of a window. It contrives, that face, a thousand things, it expresses and reflects a thousand things, I alone know its touching beauty, since I alone am able to reap all its harvests, since I alone cannot, without a glance, allow the tiniest flower of every day to die.

VII

It is not wholly within your power to be without enemies; it behooves you, indeed, not to lack adversaries. Above all, it behooves you to know your adversaries. From that to conquering them is but a short step. From that to loving them is no step at all.

Do not dread an experience too much; consider your adversary attentively and try to imagine his motives, those that he declares as well as those that he conceals, those that he invents as well as those of which he is ignorant. Think long enough and with enough intensity to understand these reasons, and even to discover new ones of which your adversary has not thought; this will not be difficult for you if you have any knowledge of yourself.

Then make a strong effort to put yourself, in spirit, in the place of him you are combatting. Do not go so far as to detest yourself, but do not refuse this opportunity of judging yourself severely. For a test: perhaps you have entered upon this experience with your teeth and fists clenched; stop when you find that you are smiling and that your hands are relaxed.

One has no idea how much this exercise inclines one to justice, how profitable it is and how destructive of hatred. Too much imagination would perhaps lead you to neglect your own cause; stop in time, therefore, unless you wish to become, as the spectators may decide, either a fool or a hero.

For my part, I have no hesitation in counselling such a practice: it teaches one to conquer, to conquer smilingly. It teaches one to know one’s adversary. And then, too, it is good as everything is good that forestalls and destroys hatred.

There is only one single thing in the world that is, perhaps, really hateful, stupidity. But even that is disputable, and moreover it is always a presumptuous assertion.

Happy is the man who has no enemies. But, I repeat, he who has no adversaries, he who has not accepted those that life offers him, or has not been able to procure any of his own will, is ignorant of a great source of wealth.

There is but small merit in understanding those whom we love; there is a great, a crowningly bitter pleasure, in penetrating a soul that is hostile to us, in making it our own by main force, in colonizing it.

Not to choose our friends, that is to be too self-denying, too modest. Not to choose our adversaries, that is altogether too stupid; it is inexcusable.

A voice whispers in my ear: “We do not choose our vermin, we do not choose our mad dogs....” Alas, no! but that is quite another matter.

VIII

Every time I hear someone use the word “promiscuity,” I recall an experience I once had. An experience,--that is a great deal to say, it was such a slight affair after all.

It was in the days when there still used to be in Paris those omnibuses with upper stories. I was returning home quite late, on one of those fresh, airy nights when one suddenly draws in, through the fetid breath of the streets, a gust that comes from afar and seems unwilling to let itself be defiled, obliterated. I was dreaming all alone, quite to myself, about things of no interest to anyone but myself, but that happily filled the infinite space of the world.

Through the depths of this reverie I became aware of a slight, muffled blow against my right shoulder. This did not rouse me from my own absorption. A second time the blow came, followed by a soft, continuous contact. It gave me a disagreeable sensation.

By my side there was a young boy of sixteen or seventeen, dressed like an apprentice. The uncertain glimmer of the street-lamps lighted up his pale, weary face. His eyes were closed and he seemed overwhelmed with sleep. I noticed that every few moments his head, swaying with the jolts of the vehicle, would strike against my shoulder. He would raise it up with an instinctive movement, only to let it fall back the more heavily the next moment. Once he let it lie there. At the time I was so lost in my dreams that the animal in me alone rose to its defense: I pushed the young lad gently back into his place. It was trouble lost; the next second he abandoned himself anew against my shoulder with a sort of desperate ingenuousness. I pushed him back two or three times, then I gave it up and tried, in spite of this slight burden, to continue my glorious excursion in the interior of my own self.

But I did not succeed. An extraordinary, unforeseen, unknown sensation was sweeping over me. It was a penetrating animal warmth. It came from that head propped against my shoulder, and also from a certain frail, bent arm which I felt slowly digging into my side. The little apprentice was sound asleep.

I bent down my face and felt his breath like that of a child passing in little puffs over my cheek and my chin. From that moment on, I ceased completely to think of my important personal affairs and I had only one anxiety: to see to it that the boy did not awaken.

I do not know how long this sleep lasted: I was warm with a strange, delicate warmth; I had a sense of well-being, I was absorbed, I was penetrating into an unknown universe, as vast, as starry as my own. I could not understand how this contact could have offended me at first, even disgusted me. I had torn off the prickly shell and was tasting, like a nourishing kernel, that human presence and companionship. I was happy and interested.

We reached a place where there were shouts and lights. The little fellow sat up with a start, rubbed his eyes and ran stumbling towards the stairway and disappeared; he had not even seen me.

He did not know what I owed him and that he would never be forgotten.

IX

One must not, at first sight, say that a man is uninteresting and that his face is expressionless. One might as well say that the water of a river is empty when it swarms with vegetable and animal life.

In one’s manner of listening to a man there may be prejudice and suspicion, there must not be indifference or indolence. The soul has, in its arsenal, lenses, microscopes, and powerful sources of light for exploring objects to their depths, through their transparencies, into the innermost recesses of their organs.

At the beginning of the war I lived for two years with a comrade who was invariably silent and indolent; his handsome face remained always so gloomy, his actions remained so devoid of purpose and significance, that I despaired of ever making him my prey; I was simply never touched with a desire to get hold of him.

Then a day came when I heard him greet some happening with a word, pronounced in such a challenging tone that I decided to undertake the expedition. I spent days and days at it, with the pickaxe, mattock, and little lantern of the miner. I have thought of him ever since with stupefaction, as of those subterranean, half-explored chasms where one finds rivers, colonnades, domes, blind animals and terrible shapes of stone.

The nature of the object should not discourage one’s interest. The viper is a dangerous and vindictive creature. The naturalists who have been able to study it have only been able to do so because they have studied with passion, that is to say, with love.

So much to tell you that that sort of zoological curiosity you may bring to the study of your neighbor no more authorizes cruelty than it allows you to dispense with affection.

Extreme attention resembles affection. Contemplation is pure love.

X

It is after my own taste that I mean to enjoy my possessions.

First, I wish to have part possession of my companions. There is no question of my being the only one to possess them, or of my limiting my empire to one or two of them. What I plan is to undertake each conquest separately. This word, we shall see, does not signify seduction, but a knowledge that is full of respect, a profound, lasting interest, an enthusiasm, a passionate contemplation.

Observe them, your comrades: say you have twenty-three of them; you will find through them twenty-three distinct representations of yourself, and that in spite of yourself, through the mere play of everyday life. One of them knows chiefly your tireless patience; another, who works beside you all day, knows that you are painstaking and irritable; he is, however, ignorant of what a third, the friend of your fireside, knows,--that you are a careful and anxious father. There are others for whom you are, above all, a soul torn by religion or a mind familiar with everything that concerns social questions, or a great lover of reading. Others, finally, see in you only a good billiard-player, or a crack shot, or a courteous companion.

You are, of course, all these things. The totality of these various aspects is, indeed, you, provided that we add also many other qualities that no one suspects. But each one of your comrades sees an aspect of you that is different from what his neighbor sees. For this reason, avoid confusion, avoid mixing things. Be lavish of yourself in every sense, but begin by being prudent, careful of your resources and skilful in the art of grouping them.

One day you were having an affectionate conversation with Maurin. You were delighted with one another, delighted to be together, satisfied with your fellowship, your mutual possession. You were not talking of anything very private. But then Blèche came up, Blèche with whom you have such profitable, such intimate talks, and all the charm of Maurin’s company disappeared without your being able to compensate yourself with the usual pleasure you take in the society of Blèche. This was because, in the presence of both, you could not give each one what you are accustomed to give him, nor could you ask from him what he gives only to you.

These combinations, like those of the chemists, demand much care and judgment. Don’t protest! Don’t exclaim that such notions are too subtle, too complex: you do not receive all your friends pell-mell. However much of an epicure you may be, you still give more attention to the selection of your guests than to the composition of the menu. Of what importance is the most delicate fare in comparison with the delight the conversation of carefully chosen human beings gives us?

That is why, when you are sure of two persons for whom you feel an interest that borders on passion, you experience such a delicious anxiety at the moment of presenting them to one another, of bringing them together in your presence.

You are like the maker of fireworks who is about to mix changeable substances with explosive properties in his mortar. You weigh them carefully and combine them in well-defined proportions. You take time preparing each of the spiritual elements of this mixture.

And when the union is accomplished, you seem to be saying to each of them: “I have prepared a magnificent gift for you. Come, now, and know one another.”

Your heart throbs, because each of them is not only going to know the other but is going to learn to know you through the eyes of the other.

Could there be a better reason for living?

XI

However brief may be the intercourse we have with a man, we always come away from it somewhat modified: we find we are a little greater than we were before, or a little less great, better or worse, exalted or diminished.

I have learned this from having, in the course of my life, approached many men, both famous and obscure, who do not dream what I owe them or the harm they have been able to do me.

We instinctively recognize and classify individuals according to this faculty they have, some of drawing us out, others of crushing us. It is a faculty they usually exert without knowing it, even against their will: they are tonic or depressing just as one is short or tall, just as one has black eyes or green. But the comparison breaks down in this respect, that it is always possible to modify the reaction we produce on others.

In this matter we exhibit a special sensibility that may be compared to the tropisms which push plants up toward the light or make them struggle against gravitation. We go toward some and flee from others, regardless of our interests or our prejudices.

The man whose companionship we seek because it stimulates us is not necessarily he who strives to give us a good opinion of ourselves. Often he is taciturn, sometimes surly, occasionally ironical and cutting. Nevertheless, there emanates from his whole person something like approbation, a confession of confidence. Even if he insists, harshly, noisily, upon calling attention to our faults, he does not make us despair of ourselves and our future. And if he never speaks to us about ourselves we yet know, by some imperceptible gesture, by some tone in his voice, by a gleam in his eye, that he is interested in us.

Every time we leave him we like him better, we like ourselves better, we like all humanity better, we look at everything with a smile, we are as full of plans as a tree in April.

The other sort of man, on the contrary, is forever deluding himself. He pursues before our very eyes an end which we see, with grief and bitterness, he regularly fails to attain. Whatever he does, whatever he says, he always shows us that he is a stranger to us, that he is superior and that we do not interest him. Even in his manner of wishing to give us his attention, he exhibits a certain difficulty in seeing us at all. If he tries to seem talkative, important, majestic, his natural gifts turn against him; his cordiality disgusts us, his bearing irritates us, his self-importance makes us want to laugh. We cannot forgive him anything, and especially the fact that we always leave him with the same vague depression, the same disgust of life, and the same distrust of our own undertakings. What we are always escapes him, and although what he is does not escape us, we are discouraged by him all the same.

We must be the first of these two men, he who is, amid all things, in spite of all things, a rich man, he whom the poet of the _Livre d’amour_ justly called “a conqueror.”

XII

You must not violate your gifts, you must simply study their possibilities. It is what we do with trees and animals in which we are able to instil virtues they do not seem to possess at all naturally.

However humble your position in society may be, however great your poverty, in the crude sense men give to this word, you may none the less become rich and successful without so much as leaving the room where you are in conversation with your comrade, your wife or your favorite adversary. Find your study there. You have observed that when two men meet they begin by sacrificing to the old custom of enquiring briefly about one another’s health and affairs, after which, without waiting for the other’s reply, each one begins to speak of himself. This is such an old usage that they do not even know they are doing it. Each one speaks of himself for a few moments, then allows the other to talk about himself for about the same length of time. When this has gone on long enough they separate, and each preserves for his partner a vague feeling of gratitude, not so much because he has listened as because he has made a pretense of listening to matters that were of no concern to him.

This fact suggests a great lesson. The majority of men suffer from a sort of neglect, they suffer from not being possessed by anyone, from offering themselves in vain. Stretch out your hand and seize them. Learn to say the word that will assure you the mastery, the domination.

It is inconceivable that so many spirits, tormented by the need for power, by the passion for authority, should waste and sterilize themselves in order to hoard money, win rank, obtain a title. They gain nothing from it but a pride that withers them; they clasp only the shadow of what they pursue.

Seek a little and you will soon find that they are legion who ask nothing better than to cast themselves into your nets. Do not believe that they are always the mediocre victims. It is not only the wretched who wish to be understood and consoled. There are many sceptics who await with anguish the touch of a hand to deliver them from their scepticism. There are many happy men, too, who cannot bear to be alone with their happiness, for man has even more need of help in joy than in sorrow.

It has often happened, while walking with a comrade, a stranger or an adversary, that I would find him hard, defiant, rebellious at every touch. Thereupon, I would set out openly, under his very eye, to capture him. I would begin to speak to him about himself. I would say to him: “The unique things about you are....” And I would confide to him everything I thought about him, being particularly careful to say nothing more about myself. I would interest myself in him, not fictitiously--that is a barren and a perilous game--but with all my heart, with all my intelligence. I would tell him what I knew, what I already possessed of him, his virtues and his faults. Confused or irritated, he would come to my feet, he would appear as if before a bar to give thanks or to plead, to show his claws or to purr. The things I had said to him might be very severe; I still felt that he was grateful to me for having cared about him, even in order to attack him. No longer was he in any haste to leave me. Often he would come back on the days that followed and make me unexpected visits; though I could see that he was provoked, I knew nevertheless that he had come to pay homage, to attest that he was a faithful subject.

“The unique things about you are”.... That is a chance phrase. There are others, there are a thousand of them. When you are ready, a grip of the hand or some other human sign may take its place. I remember the story of a certain prefect who, having no worse enemy than a traitor in his department, had the happy thought one day of asking him to have a drink and going away without paying for it. This extraordinary proof of confidence attached the man to him forever.

Not that all your victims will be so tremblingly easy. There are proud souls who set a high price on their conquest, fantastic and sick souls whom one has to seize suddenly and overthrow almost before they are aware of it.

You must set the time and choose the hour of the attack.

Do not accost the business man in the roar of the Exchange; attempt the field rather at the hour when, wearied, he is counting over and reckoning his disillusionments. Do not seize the man of action on the battlefield, but in the moment of leisure when he does not know what to do with his solitude.

What marvelous opportunities must the shy Las Casas have glimpsed at Saint Helena, even though he was pursuing other aims!

I once saw a simple soul publicly congratulate a master surgeon whose skill had for long years placed him above all felicitations. And the celebrated man blushed, bowed, gave in.

A successful lawyer said to me one day: “Each one of my clients imagines that I think only of him, that I occupy myself exclusively with him.”

Remember, too, that certain women never capitulate twice: they never forgive themselves for having yielded completely even for a moment. The same thing is true with others who are offended with you because you have “taken” them by force. Do not regret this sacrifice too much: it leaves a beautiful jewel in your casket.

Truly the whole vast race of men belongs to you.

Take and eat, you cannot find more noble food.

See, there is the world you must conquer. It is not that for whose possession proud peoples are driven to declare war; it is indeed quite another world than that which Satan showed Jesus from the summit of the mountain.

IV
ON DISCOVERING THE WORLD

I

The world contains not one single object that might not be a source of happiness. Sorrow springs from this, that man outdoes himself in misusing everything. He turns against his own body or his own spirit all sorts of things that seem well made for his joy.

Every being contains an unbelievable store of happiness, and this one virtue reveals the angle from which he ought to be judged.

Your true business man makes a practice of weighing everything in terms of gold: a human being, a field of wheat, a beam, a precious stone. His tables of value are false, but the principle of valuation remains none the less efficacious, fundamental. The mistake of these persons is in testing everything by a single measure, in reducing everything to this gold which enables them to seek their chosen pleasure. If it is drink, or woman, they transmute an orchard into wine or into women, losing terribly by the exchange. They thus produce a sort of analogy to what the physicists call the degradation of energy: little by little, the traffickers degrade their pleasures until they obtain those they prefer. But happiness is higher than this: it cannot be degraded, bought, transmuted. It is a pure relationship between the soul and the world. It will never be the mere object of a transaction. Many are the men who have fastened their hope, their future upon the acquisition of some material good only to experience after years of effort and privation a burning disillusion. That is because happiness is too proud and free a thing to obey the commands of merchants. It follows laws of its own that seem like inspirations, it does not come at the bidding of business men. The castle we have coveted so long may open at the appointed hour; joy will not take up its abode there unless we have deserved it.

It must be repeated again: the principle of evaluation is at the base of our moral life. But each thing should be valued in itself and for itself.

A tuft of violets is worth a great deal for its perfume and its beauty, it can bring joy or consolation to a great many hearts. But it has only the slightest commercial value; estimated in terms of building lumber or freestone it signifies nothing, or virtually nothing.

That so many men should cut and sell wood, shape and barter the stone of which our houses are built, go gathering violets through the May thickets to sell them to townsfolk, is undoubtedly right and necessary. The real question is quite a different one: we must first possess for their own sakes all the blessings that are offered us, and not obstinately transform them, without an important reason, beyond our strict needs, at the risk of forever losing our understanding and our true possession of them.

It is almost a truism that men who are obliged by their profession to handle, store or sell substances famous for their power of giving pleasure, perfumes, fruits, silks, end by losing all appreciation of them and even by contracting a disgust and contempt for them. Cooks have no appetite. Let us not be cooks, then, in the presence of this vast world; let us know how to preserve or restore to each object its original savor and significance.

I say “restore” intentionally, for the world seems to be more and more turning from its true sense, that is to say, its human sense, the only one for us.

A stone is a beautiful thing, beautiful from all points of view; its grain, its color, its brilliancy, its hardness are all so many virtues that exercise and satisfy our senses, excite our reflections. We have a thousand noble uses, speculative or practical, to which we can put such an object. We shall be the kings of the universe if we assert boldly that we find in these uses and in our joy the very destiny of the stone.

I remember seeing hills that had been disemboweled by a bombardment and were sown with long splinters of twisted iron; the base of a monstrous shell appeared before me, one day, under these conditions, and it seemed to me truly inhuman, this product of the work of men: the noble metal, with which so many good and beautiful things can be made, took on a hateful appearance. Man had achieved the mournful miracle of denaturing nature, rendering it ignoble and criminal.

Truly, we are equally guilty every time we turn an object aside from its mission, which is altogether one of happiness. We are guilty again every time we fail to extract, for others and for ourselves, all the happiness an object holds in store and only asks to be allowed to yield.

II

It is because every fragment of the earth is a source of happiness that men ceaselessly dream of winning that source for their own profit.

They do not wish to have all humanity refresh itself, plunge its feverish face and lips in the cool waters.

Once the springs were the delight and the wealth of whole peoples; they were conducted magnificently along majestically proportioned aqueducts; their liquid opulence, crossing valleys and mountains, entered the cities with a great outburst of architectural joy; it shone and sparkled in the sunlight from a thousand embellished apertures before it went to bathe and nourish the people.

The statues of the gods watched over this treasure.

Today, the most beautiful springs are guarded by railings; one goes to a wicket and pays in order to drink there.

In the same way, all the springs of joy seem to have been sequestered for the profit of a few people.

This is not always for the sake of gain. In most cases it is simply for exclusiveness. The man who owns something capable of giving joy naïvely imagines that he will be happier if he is the only one to drink from this inexhaustible breast. He becomes infatuated with it and thinks of nothing but how to shut up his treasure. He puts up a wall and provides it with fragments of sharp glass, so that the wall may show its teeth, so that it may be not only defensive but, in some sense, offensive. At times, yawning with ennui in the very midst of his material prosperity, he makes an opening in the wall, only to correct this imprudence with a ditch; and from behind this he seems to say, “Now see how rich I am; look and proclaim it in a loud voice, you who pass by, for I am beginning not to be so sure of it myself.”

To shut up a picture, a beautiful tree, a sumptuous tapestry for one’s own exclusive benefit is, after all, only a trifling folly; but there are some who undertake to capture a river, a mountain, a horizon, the sea.

A few years ago, I visited the shore of the Mediterranean, between Cannes and Menton. I was struck by a strange thing: the road that follows the edge of the sea, at the foot of the hills, through a thousand natural beauties, continually loses sight of the waves; it seems as if pushed back, held aside.

People have appropriated the horizon; they have driven their fortune like a wedge between the divine sea and the road of the common folk. They wish to be the only ones to possess the ocean, dawn, the gold and sapphire of moon, the tempests and the thunders of the open sea.

Do not be alarmed, mistaken brothers, do not tremble; we shall not throw down your walls. Live in peace in your sumptuous prison, our portion remains so beautiful and so great that we shall never exhaust it.

Close your gates, you will not shut in the perfume of your shrubbery, nor all the wind, nor all the sky. You will not imprison the fragrant odor of your flower-beds. We shall breathe them, as we pass, lovingly, and continue on our way. We shall go on still further, for we have many things to acquaint ourselves with, we divine so many, many of them that a whole life is short in the light of such a destiny. But if it pleases you to join our vagabond company you will discover, perhaps, the other side of your own walls, which are hung with flax-weed and wild geranium. The road that skirts them outside leads to joy also.

And besides, one does not find these ingenuous walls everywhere. The greed of men has not yet subjected all the beauty of things. You have snatched up in your fingers a fleeting draught of water: the ocean does not seem to be aware of it.

You must understand that we really possess nothing by ourselves. Veil, if you wish, the faces of your women and visit every day the gold in the depths of your vaults. Exclusiveness yields you no wealth save that which is dead and unproductive.

But he is truly rich for whom life is a perpetual discovery.

III

Discovery! It seems as if this word were one of a cluster of magic keys, one of those keys that make all doors open before our feet. We know that to possess is to understand, to comprehend. That, in a supreme sense, is what discovery means.

To understand the world can well be compared to the peaceful, enduring wealth of the great landowner; to make discoveries is, in addition to this, to come into sudden, overflowing riches, to have one of those sudden strokes of fortune which double a man’s capital by a windfall that seems like an inspiration.

The life of a child who grows up unconstrainedly is a chain of discoveries, an enriching of each moment, a succession of dazzling surprises.

I cannot go on without thinking of the beautiful letter I received today about my little boy; it said: “Your son knows how to find extraordinary riches, inexhaustible treasures, even in the barrenest fields, and when I set him on the grass, I cannot guess the things he is going to bring out of it. He has an admirable appreciation of the different kinds of soil; if he finds sand he rolls in it, buries himself in it, grabs up handfuls and flings them delightedly over his hair. Yesterday he discovered a molehole, and you cannot imagine all the pleasure he took in it. He also knows the joys of a slope which one can descend on one’s feet, or head over heels, or by rolling, and which is also splendid for somersaults. Every rise of ground interests him, and I wish you could see him pushing his cart up them. There is a little ditch where on the edge he likes to lie with his feet at the bottom and his body pressed tight against the slope. He played interminably, the other day, on top of a big stone; he kept stroking it, he had truly found a new pleasure there. And as for me, I find my wealth in watching him discover all these things.”

It is thus a child of fifteen months gives man lessons in appreciation.

Unfortunately, most systems of education do their best to substitute hackneyed phrases for the sense of discovery. A series of conventions are imposed on the child; he ceases to discover and experience the objects in the world in pinning them down with dry, formal labels by the help of which he can recognize them. He reduces his moral life little by little to the dull routine of classifying pins and pegs, and in this fashion begins the journey to maturity.

Discover! You must discover in order to be rich! You must not be satisfied to accept the night good-humoredly, to go to sleep after a day empty of all discovery. There are no small victories, no negligible discoveries: if you bring back from your day’s journey the memory of the white cloud of pollen the ripe plantain lets fall, in May, at the stroke of your switch, it may be little, but your day is not lost. If you have only encountered on the road the tiny urn of jade which the moss delightedly balances at the end of its frail stem, it may seem little, but be patient! Tomorrow will perhaps be more fruitful. If for the first time you have seen a swarm of bees go by in search of a hive, or heard the snapping pods of the broom scattering its seeds in the heat, you have nothing to complain of, and life ought to seem beautiful to you. If, on that same day, you have also enriched your collection of humanity with a beautiful or an interesting face, confess that you will go to sleep upon a treasure.

IV

There will be days when you will be like a peaceful sovereign seated under a tree: the whole world will come to render homage to you and bring you tribute. Those will be your days of contemplation.

There will be days when you will have to take your staff and wallet and go and seek your living along the highways. On these days you must be contented with what you gain from observing, from hunting; have no fear: it will be beautiful.

It is sweet to receive; it is thrilling to take. You must, by turns, charm and compel the universe. When you have gazed long at the tawny rock, with its lichens, its velvety mosses, it is most amusing to lift it up: then you will discover its weight and the little nest of orange-bellied salamanders that live there in the cool.

You have only to lie among the hairy mints and the horse-tails to admire the religious dance of the dragon-fly going to lay its eggs in the brook, or to hear in early June the clamorous orgy of the tree-toads, drunk with love; and it is very pleasant, too, to dip one’s hands in the water, to stir the gravel at the bottom, whence bubble up a thousand tiny, agile existences, or to pick the fleshy stalk of the water-lily that lifts its tall head out of the depths.

There are people who have passed a plant a thousand times without ever thinking of picking one of its leaves and rubbing it between their fingers. Do this always and you will discover hundreds of new perfumes. Each of these perfumes may seem quite insignificant, and yet when you have breathed it once, you wish to breathe it again; you think of it often, and something has been added to you.

It is an unending game and it resembles love, this possession of a world that now yields itself, now conceals itself. It is a serious, a divine game.

Marcus Aurelius, whose philosophy cannot be called futile, does not hesitate, amid many austere counsels, to urge his friends to the contemplation of those natural spectacles that are always so rich in meaning and suggestion: “Everything that comes forth from the works of nature,” he writes, “has its grace and beauty. The face wrinkles in middle age, the very ripe olive is almost decomposed, but the fruit has, for all that, a unique beauty. The bending of the corn toward the earth, the bushy brows of the lion, the foam that drips from the mouth of the wild boar and many other things, considered by themselves, are far from being beautiful; nevertheless, since they are accessory to the works of nature, they embellish them and add a certain charm. Thus a man who has a sensitive soul, and who is capable of deep reflection, will see, in whatever exists in the world, hardly anything that is not pleasant in his eyes, since it is related, in some way, to the totality of things.”

This philosopher is right as the poets are right. As our days permit us, let us reflect and observe, let us never cease to see in each fragment of the great whole a pure source of happiness. Like children drawn into a marvelous dance, let us not relax our hold upon the hand that sustains us and directs us.

V

Chalifour was a locksmith. I knew him in my childhood. You would have said that he was just a simple country laborer. Why has he left the memory of a rich and powerful man? His image will always be for me that of the “master of metals.”

He worked in a mean, encumbered room, full of the pungent, acrid odor of the forge, which seemed to me a sort of annex to those other underground vaults that used to be peopled by the earth-spirits.

How I loved to see him, with his little apron of blackened leather! He would seize a bar of iron and this iron at once became his. He had his own way of handling the object of his labor that was full of love and authority. His gnarled hands touched everything with a mixture of respect and daring; I used to admire them as if they were the somber workmen of some sovereign power.

It seemed as if some pact had been made between Chalifour and the hard metal, which gave the man complete mastery over the material. One might have thought that solemn vows had been exchanged.

I see him again with his pensive air working the panting bellows and watching the metal whose incandescence was almost transparent. I see him at the anvil: the hammer, handled forcefully, delicately, obeying like a subject demon. I see him before the drill, starting the great wheel, following the measured exigencies of a ceremonial rite. Especially I see him before the smoky window with its pale flood of light, surveying, with that fine smile under his white beard, the conquered piece of metal, the creature of his will, which he had charged with destiny.

O ancient laborer, great, simple man, how rich and enviable you were, you who aspired to just one thing: to do well what you were doing, to possess intimately the object of your toil! No one better than you has understood the ponderous, obedient iron, no one than you has worked it with greater love and constancy.

Somewhere there exists, I believe, an unhappy man eaten up with nerves and stomach-disorder. He lives crouched up against his telephone, and sends his orders to all the stock exchanges of the world. People call him the “iron king,” for some reason that has to do with finance. I don’t believe he has ever touched or weighed a morsel of real iron. Let us smile, Chalifour! Let us smile, my master!

VI

I should like to tell you about Bernier, too. They say he is a very poor man because his coat is all shiny from wear and his shoes have the weary, wretched look of things that have never been young, because the sweat of many summers has soaked and stained the ribbon of his hat and his baggy trousers give him the air of always kneeling.

Bernier has a poor little drooping moustache with nothing glorious about it. You know only too well that he earns a hundred and twenty francs a month in some government bureau and that people say of him, “He’s a poor devil with a miserable job.”