es in the evening before
lying down; although overcome with sleep, she prays clapping her hands
before the largest of our gilded idols. But she smiles with a childish
disrespect for her Buddha, as soon as her prayer is ended. I know that
she has also a certain veneration for her Ottokes (the spirits of her
ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at the house of her
mother, Madame Renoncule. She asks for their blessings, for fortune and
wisdom.

Who can fathom her ideas about the gods, or about death? Does she possess
a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure chaos of
theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect for ancient
customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation,
imported from India by saintly Chinese missionaries at the epoch of our
Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore,
must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of
a sleepy mousme!

Two very insignificant episodes have somewhat attached me to her--(bonds
of this kind seldom fail to draw closer in the end). The first occasion
was as follows:

Madame Prune one day brought forth a relic of her gay youth, a
tortoise-shell comb of rare transparency, one of those combs that it is
good style to place on the summit of the head, lightly poised, hardly
stuck at all in the hair, with all the teeth showing. Taking it out of a
pretty little lacquered box, she held it up in the air and blinked her
eyes, looking through it at the sky--a bright summer sky--as one does to
examine the quality of a precious stone.

"Here is," she said, "an object of great value that you should offer to
your little wife."

My mousme, very much taken by it, admired the clearness of the comb and
its graceful shape.

The lacquered box, however, pleased me more. On the cover was a wonderful
painting in gold on gold, representing a field of rice, seen very close,
on a windy day; a tangle of ears and grass beaten down and twisted by a
terrible squall; here and there, between the distorted stalks, the muddy
earth of the rice-swamp was visible; there were even little pools of
water, produced by bits of the transparent lacquer on which tiny
particles of gold seemed to float about like chaff in a thick liquid; two
or three insects, which required a microscope to be well seen, were
clinging in a terrified manner to the rushes, and the whole picture was
no larger than a