ta,
I had never yet seen the streets of the town thus overwhelmed by the
sunshine, thus deserted in the silence and solitary brilliancy peculiar
to all hot countries.

In front of all the shops hang white shades, adorned here and there with
slight designs in black, in the quaintness of which lurks I know not
what--something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures. The
sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this old
town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald,
notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings. These
little wooden houses, of such marvellous cleanly whiteness inside,
are black outside, timeworn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks
closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous masks
laughing in the shop-fronts of the innumerable curio-shops; in the
grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols, cruel, suspicious, mad;
it is even found in the buildings: in the friezes of the religious
porticoes, in the roofs of the thousand pagodas, of which the angles and
cable-ends writhe and twist like the yet dangerous remains of ancient
and malignant beasts.

And the disturbing intensity of expression reigning over inanimate
nature, contrasts with the almost absolute blank of the human
countenance, with the smiling foolishness of the simple little folk who
meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in
the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their
heels, carving with their imperceptible tools the droll or odiously
obscene ivory ornaments, marvellous cabinet curiosities which have
made Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it.
Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer
or of porcelain traditional designs learned by heart, or transmitted
to their brains by a process of heredity through thousands of years;
automatic painters, whose storks are similar to those of M. Sucre, with
the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies eternally the same.
The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face,
possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of
decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us
in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become
the great resource of our manufacturers of cheap "objects of art."

Is it because I am about to leave this country,