The aspirations of our souls are so plentiful, so tenacious, so fertile that we find something to console us, satisfy us, exalt us in those very spots where suffering rules tyrannically, where the valley of Gehenna is most precipitous. I visited the docks of Liverpool with a sort of horror. There were tall brick buildings, their roofs lost in the smoke, windows covered with grime, their interiors nothing but monstrous heaps of cotton bales. Men were climbing about there like flies. Everything smelt of fog and mould. Narrow pavements, slimy with rain, ran along by the dry-docks where the steamers, like immense corpses, were being assailed by the frantic crowd. The workers toiled amid a bombardment of hammers, a whirl of sparks. The drills snarled like whipped cats. A hideous light, smothered by the smoke and the mist of the Mersey, drowned everything in its fetid flood. And yet, since then, I have often dreamed of that terrible spot and felt the need of living there. For two years I attended the wounded of the First Army Corps, all of them men from the north, stained by the coal on face and chest, men from the factories or the mines. I walked with them through the smiling landscapes of the Aisne, the Vesle, the Marne, when those lovely valleys had not yet been too much disfigured by the war. Certainly they all enjoyed the slopes with their gracious groves of trees, the beautiful cultivated fields, draped like many-colored shawls over the shoulders of the little hills, but they all thought most, with love and regret, of cylinders, mine shafts, machines, and a smoky horizon. I can understand it: one’s native soil, one’s own habitude, the familiar human landscape, moulded upon the other and transfiguring it. Above everything we have to recognize that the soul is sensitive to many infinitely varied and often contradictory things. Grace of lines, rustic charm are qualities that attach us to a country; fierce and desolate grandeur is another such, and this indeed has almost the strongest nostalgic power of all. When beauty seems to have abandoned the world, we must realize that it has first deserted our own hearts. X Between your five senses, open like the dazzling portholes on the side of a ship, do you really believe there is nothing, nothing but the void, the night, the dumb wall? I do not know, I do not know.... I cannot believe.... The sound rises, rises like the skylark, and the ear rises with it. And then comes a moment when the sound still rises and the hearing stops, like those birds that do not frequent the loftiest altitudes. Tell me, are they lost truly and forever, those sounds that hold sway at the gates of your soul, those sounds to which your senses are not equal? Wait! Hope! Some day perhaps we shall know.