e, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair,
and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and
talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they
would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes
that are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate
solemn, whiskered men, pillars of the state. For surely this is the
habit of the true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of
poetry, that a man should get his head full of rhythms and catches,
and that they should jumble up somehow into short songs of his own.
What could more suggest (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words
and lovely thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise--

... Son beau corps est en terre
Son ame en Paradis.
Tu ris?
Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergere,
Ris, ma Bergere, tu ris.

That was the way they set to work in England before the Puritans came,
when men were not afraid to steal verses from one another, and when no
one imagined that he could live by letters, but when every poet took a
patron, or begged or robbed the churches. So much for the poets.

Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be digressing), is a long street
of houses all built together as animals build their communities. They
are all very old, but the people have worked hard since the
Revolution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of them very rich.
I saw but one gentleman's house, and that, I am glad to say, was in
disrepair. Most of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor,
cavernous great barns out of which came a delightful smell of morning
-- that is, of hay, litter, oxen, and stored grains and old wood;
which is the true breath of morning, because it is the scent that all
the human race worth calling human first meets when it rises, and is
the association of sunrise in the minds of those who keep the world
alive: but not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least of all in
the minds of journalists, who know nothing of morning save that it is
a time of jaded emptiness when you have just done prophesying (for the
hundredth time) the approaching end of the world, when the floors are
beginning to tremble with machinery, and when, in a weary kind of way,
one feels hungry and alone: a nasty life and usually a short one.

To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a village all along one
street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at
college