How strange the resonance that certain syllables have for us! He might have designated by its name the mountain where his flocks were to pasture, and I should not have noticed it, but the unexpected lack of precision communicated to me by some sorcery a longing for the heights. It attacked me as suddenly and unexpectedly as a lightning shock. I had not felt the charm of the wild, bare place from which I was returning with grandfather; but now I was not only instantaneously initiated into it,--I augmented its wildness and isolation. I felt upon my brow a colder, sterner breath, the wind of summits which I had never seen. Later in my life poems and symphonies have given me this imaginary sensation, though more faintly. In each discovery that it makes the heart, like a virgin, gives of its freshness. Before the passing of the sheep I had managed to discover where we were. Notwithstanding its surrounding trees, I had proudly recognised the house below us in the edge of the town. It had always appeared very large to me, vast as a kingdom, and now I seemed to find it small and insignificant, simply because I had heard within me the music of three words, “To the mountain.” A few years later it was my lot to climb over mountains, those that are covered with pines and larches, and those whose only vegetation is ice, those that are carpeted with grass, soft as rosy flesh, those that are all bone and muscle, like Michel Angelo’s figures, and again those whose treacherous whiteness only loses its immobility under the warming glow of the setting sun. They have taught me patience, calmness, and perhaps also contempt, though one of the most difficult of Christian precepts obliges us to despise no man. There I have met and tasted by turns war and peace, struggle and serenity, the intoxication of solitude and the glory of conquest in the blinding splendour of the snow. They have never given me anything that was not contained in germ in the shepherd’s reply. On our return home, when we opened the gate, there were Tem Bossette and his two acolytes digging, their faces bent on the ground. One of them having perceived us, they rested with one accord, sure of our complicity. Aunt Deen congratulated me on my red cheeks; mother thanked grandfather for his care of me. Father asked: “Did you enjoy it?” and rejoiced when I answered in the affirmative. No one suspected, I least of all, that that little boy, till then contented, and never dreaming of anything outside of The House, had brought desire home with him from his walk. III THE DISCOVERY OF THE EARTH