Writing lives or stories in such and such a color is one of the things I have recently tried to do, and the attempt has in some instances proved to be a rather delicate affair to manage. There are blue women; there are rose ones, and mauve and red; that is to say, they may be scarcely represented except in association with one of these colors or shades. Conceiving an old maid who had retained her good looks, who was very pious and yet of very equivocal habits, I could see her only in violet. The story is violet from beginning to end; it was impossible for me to introduce a different hue; I would have felt that I was committing a gross offence against harmony. The lady is vowed to violet: to place upon her head a blue or rose hat would have been a sort of sacrilege which would have terrified even her. Can this be the reason why her narrow life as an old maid found late in life so many happy, if perverse, days? Without a doubt, for violet, which is her color, is also her logic, and it is always well to have respected the logic of one's destiny. Now, in thus amusing myself, I have not made any pretensions toward reforming esthetics, nor toward revolutionizing the conditions of the art of writing. I have simply been playing with a box of pastels, loving the colors for themselves, one by one, somewhat in the manner of the great and singular artist Odilon Redon, whose flowers are so real that one is moved to smell them. We have our favorite colors. Tastes and colors.... This aphorism is not at all so frivolous as one might believe. Nietzsche, who was by no means a superficial spirit, cites it willingly. It is an argument that favors individualistic philosophy and freedom of thought. It is an argument, too, and not the least valuable, that supports determinism and the philosophy of necessity. For the colors we love are not dictated by choice but by a secret sympathy which it is impossible for us to reason out. The study of tastes and colors should form part of psychology. Perhaps there might even be discovered here the elements of a new science. Being fond of red or of green is not a matter to be dismissed with indifference.