I bless you, oh humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and watching the faces of the poor. But I reach the hillside where the prickly furze is spread, and in musing upon my difficulties I am filled with a beneficent gentleness. To-day it is no longer the coarse and disdainful laugh of the public, nor the terrible doubt of everything, which disturbs me. The laugh of my detractors has grown wearied, and I have become indifferent to what I am. Yet I have become grave toward myself and others. It is with an apprehensive joy that I regard the heedlessness of the happy. I have learned what misery may spring from love, what blindness is born of a glance. And it is because of what I have suffered that I would bestow a sad and slow caress on those who have not yet known anything but happiness. * * * * * The open door, the blue sky, the watering of the grass and the gilliflowers, and the hyacinths, and a single bird which chirps, and my dogs stretched on the ground and the rosebushes with their thick stems, the verdure of the lilacs, and a clock that is striking, a wasp which flies straight and marks the meadow with the lines of its golden vibration, and stops, hesitates, sets off again, is silent and buzzes.... Hearts and choirs of primroses in the moist, shadowy mosses of the woods; long threads of rose and blue dew floating and swinging and suspended--from what?--in the immaterial morning; tree-frogs with golden eye-lids and white throbbing throats; furze whose perfume of faded peach and rose follows along the roads, already torrid.... Iris, cries of jays, turtledoves, mountains of blue snow which are rocks of azure, green fields laid out in squares, brook rolling a golden pebble in the silence; first foliage of the waters, icy trembling of the body beside the springs when the sun lies burning on your hands.... * * * * * Slender alders; fiery marshes where toward noonday puffing out their throat, the hoarse gray frogs climb up on the coriaceous plants, while slowly from the deep of the shady and gilded mire rises a bubble.... Dry and twisted vines; swarms of insects from the blossoms of rosy peach-trees, in slanting flight into the azure; pear-trees and roses of Bengal.... * * * * * Setting of the cherry sun; nocturnal snow of a fruit-tree; green and transparent shadowing of the lanes; summit of little hills at seven o'clock where the trees are like sponges which little by little blend into the severity of the uniform curve which swells and rises sharply. Starless night; violet night in which the white sandals of a beloved pagan can hardly be distinguished, and dense bristling of slender, dry trees; pallor of a limestone slope, and water in which something casts two long and deep shadows....