futile one, if your
blood flows faster, if you feel happier, if you are proud of yourself?
To win a great victory or put on a new bonnet, what matters it if this
new bonnet gives you the same joy as a laurel crown?

Therefore do not laugh too much at baby if his first pair of breeches
intoxicates him, if, when he wears them, he thinks his shadow longer and
the trees less high. He is beginning his career as a man, dear child,
nothing more.

How many things have not people been proud of since the beginning of the
world? They were proud of their noses under Francis the First, of their
perukes under Louis XIV, and later on of their appetites and stoutness.
A man is proud of his wife, his idleness, his wit, his stupidity, the
beard on his chin, the cravat round his neck, the hump on his back.

CHAPTER XXX. COUNTRY CHILDREN

I love the baby that runs about under the trees of the Tuileries; I
love the pretty little fair-haired girls with nice white stockings and
unmanageable crinolines. I like to watch the tiny damsels decked out
like reliquaries, and already affecting coquettish and lackadaisical
ways. It seems to me that in each of them I can see thousands of
charming faults already peeping forth. But all these miniature men and
women, exchanging postage stamps and chattering of dress, have something
of the effect of adorable monstrosities on me.

I like them as I like a bunch of grapes in February, or a dish of green
peas in December.

In the babies' kingdom, my friend, my favorite is the country baby,
running about in the dust on the highway barefoot and ragged, and
searching for black birds' and chaffinches' nests on the outskirts
of the woods. I love his great black wondering eye, which watches you
fixedly from between two locks of un combed hair, his firm flesh bronzed
by the sun, his swarthy forehead, hidden by his hair, his smudged face
and his picturesque breeches kept from falling off by the paternal
braces fastened to a metal button, the gift of a gendarme.

Ah! what fine breeches; not very long in the legs, but, then, what room
everywhere else! He could hide away entirely in this immense space which
allows a shirt-tail, escaping through a slit, to wave like a flag. These
breeches preserve a remembrance of all the garments of the family; here
is a piece of maternal petticoat, here a fragment of yellow waistcoat,
here a scrap of blue handkerchief; the whole sewn with a thread that
presents the twofold