A louis has been overlooked in a corner of a drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardising the domestic balance. The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion—for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all trades if you would make both ends meet—sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet-iron and a tap to let the water out. Many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water? [95] The delight of my earliest childhood, the pond, is still a spectacle of which my old age can never tire. But even with all the visions which it evokes, how far inferior is the “pond” of Sérignan to the pond of Saint-Léons, “the pond with the little ducks on it, so rich in illusions! Such a pond is not met with twice in a lifetime. One needs to be equipped with one’s first pair of breeches and one’s earliest ideas in order to have such luck!” [96] In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the Crickets at their concerts, a second wish often came to me. Beside the road I light upon a dead Mole, a Snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly. The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoso approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave death’s artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most deserving work. To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life’s treasure-house: these are things that long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the Mole lying in the dust of the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters. It was not the place for philosophising over a stench. What would people say who passed and saw me!