Yesterday I was watching some prisoners working. They were pushing the trunk of a tree lashed to a cart. Sweat was rolling down their faces, for the heat was great, the slope steep and the load heavy. An armed soldier was watching them. Large letters were printed on their clothes to proclaim their servitude. And I thought: they live, they do not look too unhappy, they do not seem crushed by their condition. And if this is so, it is not because they have the placidity of beasts. No! Look at their eyes, listen to their voices. It is precisely because they are men and they carry everywhere with them two refuges, whither the gaoler cannot follow them, two precious possessions that no punitive discipline can snatch from them: their future and their memories. The longer I watch, from close by, those men who, for four years have led the inhuman life of the army, the better I understand the meaning of their incredible patience: between the future and the remembered past they have the air of awaiting the passage of a storm. They are gulping down, you would say, hastily and with closed eyes, this bitter and criminal present, in order to reserve their hearts all the better for the things of the future and the past. One feels in their conversation only these two luminous existences. They seek and unite them unceasingly above the bloody abyss. I have also observed that, in the concerts they give themselves to cheer their periods of rest, their souls always return, with the same rapture, to their former way of living, to their old sons, their familiar ways of being sad or joyous. The artistic attempts that are carried on to interest them, at the bottom of their hearts, in the formidable present, remain sterile and, as it were, dry. They seem to reply, silently: “What have all these things to do with us? Isn’t it enough for us to live them? Isn’t it enough for us to do them, every day with our blood and tears? Give us back our dear kingdom. Give back to our souls that memory which is their most imperishable and marvelous possession.” II Between the future and the remembered past, man is left to struggle with what he possesses least, the present. And yet this present is lavish of all sorts of materials that we can transform into riches. It is our liquid fortune, mobile and in circulation. It is the well-filled purse upon which we draw for our daily needs. It reaches us out of the depths of time, like a great river, loaded with sailing-ships and steamers, deep, flowing, beautiful with all its reflections, and rolling gold in its sands. But it has its rages, its whims, its cruelties. According to the season, it overflows and desolates the land or suddenly dries up and deserts the fields that it refreshed with its floods!