You have conquered one whole happy day. Contemplate without regret the sleep that marks its end, for you will continue to live this day during all the rest of jour life. And if this day was truly beautiful, do you not know that others after you will continue to live it, down, ever farther down, the succession of the years? Let your son grow, without too much anxiety, like a beautiful tree: the child he was once, the child he was but now, the child he is at present, you will not lose them, O insatiable heart! They will escort you toward old age, like a beloved multitude that increases every day and cannot die. Owing to the war, I have seen my own child only seven times, and each time I have hardly recognized him. Seven times I have believed him lost. I know now that I have seven lovely images in my soul, seven children to adorn and hearten my solitude. IV There are beauties which the present fails to appreciate. That is natural, because it is greedy, disordered, care-ridden. Memory exists to see that justice is done. To it falls the divine rôle of restoring and, at times, pardoning. (It is memory which, in the last resort, vindicates and judges. It is in its light that things appear to us under the aspect of eternity.) None of our thoughts would be really happy that had not received the approbation of memory, that did not find themselves sealed at last with its sovereign imprint. We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on color; and only then, after that recoil and that transfiguration, do we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil splendor. Days of ours that had seemed to us dull and hopeless show themselves in memory luminous and decisive. Journeys undertaken without eagerness, without enthusiasm, and without any of the freshness of surprise, become, from a distance, fruitful in revelations and discoveries. Every reality develops with time a thousand aspects of itself that are just as real, as charged with meaning and consequence, as the original aspect. We cannot foretell what memory will contrive for us. It is a treasure all the more precious and unexpected because it is so independent of our rudimentary logic. For the logic of memory is more subtle than ours; it seems entirely free from our miserable calculations; it draws its inspirations from our true interests, which we ourselves are forever misapprehending. The slow task it pursues testifies to so rare a virtue and so munificent a wisdom that man, struck with his own unworthiness, might well seek there the signs of a divine intervention. Sometimes it is a friend, whom we have misunderstood or misjudged, who takes on in memory his true aspect and his true stature and reveals the profound influence which, without our knowing it, he has exercised over our thoughts.