Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of
lacquer or of porcelain traditional designs learnt 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, because I have no
longer any link to bind me to it, any resting-place on its soil, and
that my spirit is already on the wing? I know not, but it seems to me
I have never as clearly seen and comprehended it as to-day. And more
even than ever, do I find it little, aged, with worn-out blood and
worn-out sap; I feel more fully its antediluvian antiquity, its
centuries of mummification, which will soon degenerate into hopeless
and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes into contact with Western
novelties.

It is getting late; little by little, the siestas are everywhere
coming to an end; the queer little streets brighten up and begin to
swarm in the sunshine with many-colored parasols. Now begins the
procession of uglinesses of the most impossible description,--a
procession of long-robed, grotesque figures capped with pot-hats or
sailors' head-gear. Business transactions begin again, and the
struggle for existence, close and bitter here as in one of our own
artisan quarters, but meaner and smaller.

At the moment of my departure, I can only find within myself a smile
of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Liliputian
curtseying people,--laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted
with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and
incurable monkeyishness.

Poor cousin 415, how right I was to have held him in good esteem; he
is by far the best and most disinterested of my Japanese family. When
all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle under a
tree, and much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting me on
board the _Triomphante_, to watch over my final purchases in the
sampan which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself sa