Snow has been falling throughout the night. Risking a shot, for the new orders from headquarters are still more stringent, I walked for a good hour at dawn upon the northern ramparts. When the sun rose over the village of Hepperg there was sketched in the opposite quarter, towards France, in three strokes of the brush, the most striking of pastels: in the foreground, the old gold of the oaks, flaming, sanguine, and burnished: in the middle distance, the wide field of virgin snow; in the background, the heavy and sombre line of the pines, interspersed with larches, sparkling with hoar-frost. Solitude amid inanimate things, in the morning, restores me to the tranquil possession of myself, induces a peaceful, strong, and simple happiness which neither the society of my fellows, nor meditation, nor prayer can ever furnish. At one time this calm, as of Eden, used to terrify me. It seemed to me impious. When, as a youth, I loitered among the wild oak-groves which form scattered oases amid the limestone mazes of Païolive in Vivarais, it seemed to me that their shade was stifling my faith, that the seated giants of white stone, amid which the Ardèche has hollowed its precipitous channel, were swallowing my Christian dogmas, and that my Eliacin-like fervours were evaporating into the torrid sky, passing upward with the furnace breath which rises in summer from this formidable landscape. Since then, however, I have learned to feel no doubt regarding the primacy of man vis-à-vis the grandeur of inanimate things. No, my delight in natural scenery is by no means pantheistic. I believe too firmly in the hierarchy of creation, and I am too strongly imbued with the Christian conception that man is a person, as it were a son of God, an absolute individuality, inviolable, raised above life and death, to be able to lose my sense of personal identity in the contemplation of rocks, fields, and woodlands. It is simply that I love fresh air and open spaces; I love the lineaments of nature, which are more beautiful than the doings of men; I love the society of the meadows and of the trees, a society which is less importunate and talkative than that of my fellows, and which never fails to restore me to myself. Perhaps, moreover, I tend instinctively to idolize colour and light, seeing that God has concentrated in my eyes, above all, the power of sensuous appreciation.