The steward Andoche came in, while I was still foaming with rage; he begged me as an old acquaintance to calm myself, and led me from the room, saying what he could to console me. “They are only bits of wood, after all,” he said. “It is not worth while for you to excite yourself so for things like that; and what would you do if you had to live here, like us, with this lunatic? If he wants to knock anything about,--and after all a man must have some pleasure,--why should he not kick these chunks of wood, for which you got a fair price, instead of good Christians like you and me?” “I don’t care how much he beats you,” said I. “I had rather have been flogged myself than have had him injure this wood into which I had breathed the breath of life. Do you think a man cares for his bones? It is his thought that is sacred to him, and he who kills that is thrice guilty!” Carried away by my own eloquence, I might have kept on like this for hours, but I saw that Andoche did not grasp a word of it, and indeed seemed to think that I was nearly as cracked as his Master. I turned on the threshold and gave a last look, as one may say, at the field of battle, where lay my poor noseless creations; there was Andoche with his pitying smile, and here was I wasting my breath in cursing at these dummies. It struck me all at once as so deucedly funny, that I just laughed in Andoche’s face, and went off in a gust of merriment which seemed to carry away my anger and my pain along with it. I struck out towards Clamecy, musing as I went, “This time,” thought I, “they may as well stick me under ground; for there is nothing left of the old man but his skin. Hold on, though, there may be something worth while inside of that,--I remember a story of a fellow who was besieged, and they told him to yield, or they would kill all his children. He answered that if they did, he knew how to make a lot of new ones. That is my position exactly. In the dry places of the earth we artists have sown grain which wild beasts and birds of the air come to devour, because they do not know how to create, and can only feed on the works of others; but let them trample and uproot as much as they will, I have a store from which I can replenish the fruitful soil. Let the wheat ripen or die, it does not matter, for my eyes are fixed, not on the past, but on the future, and when the day comes, as it will, when none are left to me of all my members, when the sight of my eyes is dimmed, and my hands have lost their cunning, then when that time comes, Colas, you will have ceased to be. Is it possible to imagine a Breugnon, who cannot work or feel, who does not laugh or spring from the ground with both feet at once? No, then he will be only a withered nut, you can throw the old shell into the fire!”