And in this /et cœtera/ we have set now a hundred library shelves in the shadow--sparing thus our most fastidious readers an extremely bitter pill, and sparing ourselves also the fatigues of an interminable catalogue of no great profit to any one, considering the nature of the work in question, and the fashion in which we have treated it. At the conclusion of the three unpretending pieces of chit-chat which we have just engaged in about /The Sunshade, the Glove, and the Muff/, people may expect to see figuring here the lineaments or first matters of the canvas on which we embroidered our bold arabesques. People will be deceived. It will please us for this time to hide the innumerable instruments of our thefts; they are still there by our sides, making walls and barricades upon our tables and the seats round about us. But if, on the termination of a task, we love usually to put back regularly in order a library turned upside down by the fever of researches, happy in being nourished by the intellectual juice of old books, sometimes also we are prostrated by that intense discouragement which "dumfounds a man," according to an every-day expression. In fact, the result has not answered so great a working up of material, a picture has been dreamed of too big for the frame, the artist has been obliged to reduce himself, to resign himself, and to put in nothing of his own essence; in short, the Mosaic /littérateur/ looks at the Little Thing he has just finished beside the Great Matter which he had conceived. In like conditions, the /meâ culpâ/ is the sole preventive parade that can be made in his retreat to questions which become twisted into a note of interrogation on the smiling lips of the reader. To make an inventory of the books we have consulted would be a torture worse than that of Tantalus, for desire, far from looking forward with eagerness, would look sadly back, like an old man who sees again in memory the women of his twentieth year, whom he has let fly under the willows without profiting in their pursuit by the vigour of his legs. These books--which we serve not up here--are full of documents which we have not been able to enshrine, and it seems that the crumbs which fall from the table make a larger volume than the repast which has just been taken. For the rest, a truce to sadness and superfluous regrets! Who knows whether we are not odiously unjust to ourselves? Who knows whether the little schoolboy path which we have chosen is not the prettiest, the least rugged, the most unforeseen--that is to say, the least painful and the most verdant, and at the same time the shortest? Every work, however small it may be, requires distance, a time of calm and oblivion. The eye of the painter wanders in distress before one and the same picture for entire days; the brain of an investigator becomes anchylosed and petrified by dreaming in one and the same atmosphere of small ideas which remain attached to dress.