A youthful and charming woman maintained to me one day, I forget on what occasion, that moon strokes are infinitely more dangerous than sun strokes. They are caught, she said, unawares, out walking perchance on a beautiful night, and they are incurable; you remain mad; not raving mad, not mad enough to be shut up, but mad of a special madness, gentle, incurable; and you no longer think on any subject like other men. I have certainly been moon-struck to-night, for I feel strangely unreasonable and light headed; and the little crescent in its downward course towards the sea affects me, melts me to tears, and rends my heart. Wherein lies the power of seduction of this moon, aged dead planet that it is, rambling through the heavens with its yellow face and sad ghostly light, that it should thus agitate us, we whom even our vagabond thoughts disturb? Do we love it because it is dead? as the poet Haraucourt says: "Puis ce fut l'âge blond des tiédeurs et des vents. La lune se peupla de murmures vivants: Elle eut des mers sans fond et des fleuves sans nombre, Des troupeaux, des cités, des pleurs, des cris joyeux, Elle eut l'amour; elle eut ses arts, ses lois, ses dieux, Et lentement rentra dans l'ombre."[1] Do we love it because the poets, to whom we owe the eternal illusion that surrounds us in this world, have dimmed our sight by all the images they have seen in its pallid rays, have taught our over-excited sensibility to feel in a thousand different ways, the soft and monotonous effects it sheds over the world? When it rises behind the trees, when it pours forth its shimmering light on the flowing river, when it descends through the boughs on to the sand of the shaded alleys, when it mounts solitary in the black and empty sky, when it dips towards the sea, stretching out on the undulating surface of the waters a vast pathway of light, are we not haunted by all the charming verses with which it has inspired great dreamers? If we wander forth by night in joyous spirits, and if we see its smooth circle, round like a yellow eye watching us, perched just over a roof, Musset's immortal ballad is recalled to our mind. [Illustration 028] And is it not he, the mocking poet, who immediately presents it to us through his eyes? "C'était dans la nuit brune, Sur le clocher jauni La lune Comme un point sur un I. Lune, quel esprit sombre Promène an bout d'un fil, Dans l'ombre, Ta face ou ton profil?"[2] [Illustration 029] If we walk on some evening full of sadness, on the beach by the side of the ocean illuminated by its rays, do we not, in spite of ourselves, at once recite the two grand and melancholy lines: "Seule au-dessus des mers, la lune voyageant, Laisse dans les flots noirs tomber ses pleurs d'argent."[3] [Illustration 030]