ongs and landscapes and faces much more
desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So
also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the
songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in
by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than
these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial
there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that
our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert
and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.

As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely
ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of
evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling
slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my
sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the
miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half
round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open
Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat
down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little
thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had
carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful
march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth
drinking after I had passed the frontier.

I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to
which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on
into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a
wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched
jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the
Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.

So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to
cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point
came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French
town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had
covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis
and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and
said--

'Am I in Switzerland?'

A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial
traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all said together
in varying accents: