Discover! You must discover in order to be rich! You must not be satisfied to accept the night good-humoredly, to go to sleep after a day empty of all discovery. There are no small victories, no negligible discoveries: if you bring back from your day’s journey the memory of the white cloud of pollen the ripe plantain lets fall, in May, at the stroke of your switch, it may be little, but your day is not lost. If you have only encountered on the road the tiny urn of jade which the moss delightedly balances at the end of its frail stem, it may seem little, but be patient! Tomorrow will perhaps be more fruitful. If for the first time you have seen a swarm of bees go by in search of a hive, or heard the snapping pods of the broom scattering its seeds in the heat, you have nothing to complain of, and life ought to seem beautiful to you. If, on that same day, you have also enriched your collection of humanity with a beautiful or an interesting face, confess that you will go to sleep upon a treasure. IV There will be days when you will be like a peaceful sovereign seated under a tree: the whole world will come to render homage to you and bring you tribute. Those will be your days of contemplation. There will be days when you will have to take your staff and wallet and go and seek your living along the highways. On these days you must be contented with what you gain from observing, from hunting; have no fear: it will be beautiful. It is sweet to receive; it is thrilling to take. You must, by turns, charm and compel the universe. When you have gazed long at the tawny rock, with its lichens, its velvety mosses, it is most amusing to lift it up: then you will discover its weight and the little nest of orange-bellied salamanders that live there in the cool. You have only to lie among the hairy mints and the horse-tails to admire the religious dance of the dragon-fly going to lay its eggs in the brook, or to hear in early June the clamorous orgy of the tree-toads, drunk with love; and it is very pleasant, too, to dip one’s hands in the water, to stir the gravel at the bottom, whence bubble up a thousand tiny, agile existences, or to pick the fleshy stalk of the water-lily that lifts its tall head out of the depths. There are people who have passed a plant a thousand times without ever thinking of picking one of its leaves and rubbing it between their fingers. Do this always and you will discover hundreds of new perfumes. Each of these perfumes may seem quite insignificant, and yet when you have breathed it once, you wish to breathe it again; you think of it often, and something has been added to you. It is an unending game and it resembles love, this possession of a world that now yields itself, now conceals itself. It is a serious, a divine game.