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others each so tenderly expansive in contemplation of her child, so happy in its health and strength, so joyous and so proud of its small progress, the recollection of a phenomenon which I had not at first observed struck me with all the force of a vivid actuality. I should say, by the way, that it is much more to the strength of my memory than to the present observation of facts, that I owe these remarks. Stability is the _sine qua non_ of the things one proposes to examine, and the memory must possess the singular power of communicating fixity to fugitive things, permanence to instantaneousness, and actuality to the past. Now, the phenomena of life occurring with the rapidity of lightning can only be studied retrospectively; that is to say, in the domain of memory, except to be verified if the attention, free from all other preoeccupation, allows us to seize them on the wing once more. The remark suggested to me by memory seemed all the more interesting because it formed in a new order of facts a flagrant opposition to the opinion formulated by my masters under the title of theory. Thus nature once more proved to me that the only point in which I had found them to agree, rested upon a fundamental error. I have since recognized that it is thus in the majority of cases, so that one may almost certainly pronounce erroneous any statement in regard to which all the masters of art agree. This proposition at first seems inexplicable, but its reason is readily understood by those who know the sway of falsehood over a society perverted in its opinions as in its tastes; to those who know the deplorable facility with which error is spread and the tenacity with which it clings to our poor mind. Error, moreover, owes to our abasement which it flatters and crushes, the privilege of freedom from contradiction, and it is only in regard to truth that the minds of men are divided and contend. On retracing in my memory the walks I had taken in the Tuileries, I was struck by an important fact amidst the phenomena called up: the voice of the nurse or mother, when she caressed her child, invariably assumed the double character of tenuity and acuteness. It was in a voice equally sweet and high-pitched that she uttered such words as these: "How lovely he is!" ... "Smile a little bit for mamma!" Now this caressing intonation, impressed by nature upon the upper notes of all these voices, forms a strange contrast to the direction which
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