“Your good health, old boy!” I say to myself, “I am to have a talk with you now.” Downstairs I can hear my wife raging while the wind roars outside and I am told there are threatenings of war. Well, let them be!--How jolly it is to be alone face to face with the best fellow in the world (I am talking of course of my other self, of you, Colas, with your old red phiz, and queer grin, with your long Burgundian nose all askew like a hat on one ear). Tell me if you can why it is so good to see you like this, just our two selves; to look closely at your elderly countenance, touching lightly, as it were, on the wrinkles, and to drink a bumper of old remembrance from the bottom of my heart which is like a deep well, worse luck! It is pleasant enough to dream, but still better to pin one’s dreams down to paper! However, I am no visionary, but wide-awake, full of fun and clear-sighted, with no idle fancies in my head. I only tell what I have seen, done, and said; and for whom do I write? Certainly not for fame; for I am no fool, and know what I amount to, the Lord be praised! I write for my grandchildren? Little will be left of all my scribblings in ten years, as the old woman is jealous of them, and burns whatever she can lay hands on. For whom, then? Why, for my other self, of course, for our good pleasure.--I am sure I should burst if I did not write! Truly I am not for nothing the child of my grandfather, who could not sleep unless he had put down on the edge of his pillow the number of flagons he had emptied. I feel I must talk, and here in Clamecy I have had my fill of word contests. I must break loose, like the fellow who shaved King Midas. I know my tongue runs away with me; and it would be at the risk of my neck if I were heard; but what’s the odds! without its dangers life would be flat enough. I am like our big white oxen, and love to chew the cud of the day’s food. How good it is to taste, feel, and handle all one has thought, observed, or picked up; to smack one’s lips, to relish, as one tells it over to one’s self, something one snapped up hastily--it seems to melt in one’s mouth, and slip down softly; and how good it is to glance around one’s little world and say, “All this is mine, here I am lord and master, no frost or cold can nip me; here reigns no king, no pope! Not even my old shrew!” But now I must take an account of this world of mine.