I am not happy today; I am not pleased with myself, I am not pleased with anyone; I feel quite certain that everything I undertake will be a failure, above all, above all, I do not want to undertake anything; I view all things with an unprofitable eye, an irritable and apparently dried-up soul. I am driven to suffer myself and make others suffer. Oh! I am without grace! I know it and I am far from admiring myself. Secretly I long to feel grace at last descending on my head and shoulders like a mantle of soft sunshine, like the honeyed perfume that falls from the lime-trees. What does that old man want? Why does he repeat with a sort of obstinacy: “It depends upon you to make a good use of every event”? No doubt it depends upon me! But what are we to do when nothing can be blamed upon events? And what when, indeed, there are no events. Is it true that it depends upon me to be myself at such times also? Answer me, great, silent trees! Answer me, fir-tree, weighted down with sleet and dreaming--Heine has told me--of the palm consumed with burning heat in the tropics. “Drive out,” replies the philosopher, “drive out your desires and your fears and you will never again suffer tyranny.” True; but I have only one fear: not to be the best man I may; only one desire, not to give in to myself. The sage shrugs his shoulders and then says in a gentle voice: “Bear and forbear.” And he is not thinking only of the storms that come from without. He says this because he well knows that in order to be happy one must be visited by grace. All the stoics have drawn up rules of virtue. Not one has suggested the means that will give us the strength to apply them. For the wish is not enough. The gift is necessary, that secret impulse which is grace itself. VI Praise be to thee, divine world, that hast delivered me from anger by revealing to me in time that trembling blossom of the convolvulus! Praise be to thee, divine world, that, at the very limit of my fatigue, in the midst of my perils, hast chosen mysterious ways to light me with an inner smile! Millions of unhappy men who are suffering at this moment on the fields of distracted Europe are aware that at the blackest moment of distress a strange consolation can penetrate them; it is as if the fingers clutching one’s heart suddenly relaxed their grip. There are some who call this God. Many others give no name to the miracle, but long for it on their knees all the same. The voice no longer speaks from the burning bush. Sometimes it is the sound of last year’s leaves still rustling in the branches of an oak. Sometimes there is no sound; only the speaking glance of a veronica in ecstasy among the April fields.