No More Learning

I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which
give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make
us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning I
arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as
it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant
act--and then, alas, I opened the window.

(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification is
not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous
inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the
feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by
those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the mood
which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and
inconvenient acts. )

The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose shrill
and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere
of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for the sudden
and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.

"Hello, there! " I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected, not
without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the
stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending,
and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile
merchandise.

At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose
and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are
insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that
would make one see beauty in life? " And I hurried him briskly to the
staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.

I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the
man appeared in the door-way beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits.
It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful! "

Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?




THE WIDOWS.


Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted
principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted
glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted
souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who thus
betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the
well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's
cripples.

To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct their
avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for if there
is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the
place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void has no attractions
for them. On the contrary they feel themselves irresistibly drawn
towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft.

An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected
lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last
fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound
wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience
deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded
effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.

Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor
widows, I mean.