do not know
myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
tedious business. No, I haven't the smallest desire to hold converse
with the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the
other hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that
little fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against
the frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a
nice little chap. I feel like calling him and saying "Let's go and have
a game together shall we?" But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That
little boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead
as if I were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For
what have we in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me
to-day? In what do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?

We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
over again.

[Illustration: 046]

I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart
like a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to
soothe all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the
child that I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me;
I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without
unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my
innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in
swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding
life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of
irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not
already been delved within her, though she is but five years old. I,
a stranger, a passer-by, know more of her life than she does and, in
consequence, I am more truly she than she herself. After that let him
who will prate of the feeling of identity and the consciousness of self.

Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss
of terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
slippers off