Once the house was bought, the best that I could do was to live in it; I have arranged it as it is. From the windows of the drawing-room one sees first what the English call a "pleasure-ground," a proscenium consisting of a lawn and some blocks of shrubs. Beyond this enclosure, on the other side of wall, the height of a man's breast, surmounted by a white, lozenged fence, is a field of mixed cultivation, reserved for the provender of the cattle of the Infirmary. Beyond this field comes another piece of ground separated from the field by another breast-high wall in green open-work, interlaced with viburnums and Bengal roses; these marches of my State embrace a clump of trees, a meadow and an alley of poplars. This nook is extremely solitary; it does not smile to me like Horace' nook: "_angulus ridet._[498]" On the contrary, I have sometimes shed tears there. The proverb says that "youth must have its fling." The decline of life also has some freaks to overlook: Les pleurs et la pitié, Sorte d'amour ayant ses charmes[499]. My trees are of a thousand kinds. I have planted twenty-three cedars of Lebanon and two druid oaks: they make game of their short-lived master, _brevem dominum._ A mall, a double avenue of chesnuts, leads from the upper to the lower garden; the ground slopes rapidly along the field between. I did not choose these trees, as at the Vallée aux Loups, in memory of the spots which I have visited: he who takes pleasure in recollection cherishes hopes. But, when one has no children, nor youth, nor country, what attachment can one bear to trees whose foliage, flowers, fruits are no longer the mysterious numerals employed in the calculation of the periods of illusion. In vain people say to me, "You are growing younger:" do they think that they will make me take my wisdom-teeth for my milk-teeth? And even the latter have been given me only to eat a bitter loaf under the Royalty of the 7th of August. For the rest, my trees are not much interested to know whether they serve as a calendar for my pleasures or as a death-certificate of my years; they increase daily, from the day that I decrease: they wed those of the grounds of the Foundling Hospital and the Boulevard d'Enfer which surround me. I do not see a single house; I should be less separated from the world at two hundred leagues from Paris. I hear the bleating of the goats which feed the abandoned orphans. Ah, if I had been, like these, in the arms of St. Vincent de Paul[500]! Born of a frailty, obscure and unknown as they are, I should to-day be some nameless workman, having no concern with men, nor knowing either why or how I entered life or how and why I was to quit it. [Sidenote: Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse.]