hour, each minute. . . .

* * * * *

. . . Yes, it gives me pleasure to tell you about my life; it is a fine
life in so many ways. Often, at night, as I walk along the road where
my little duty takes me, I am full of happiness to be able thus to
communicate with the greatness of Nature, with the sky and its
harmonious pattern of stars, with the large and gracious curves of these
hills; and though the danger is always present, I think that not only
your courage, your consciousness of the eternal, but also your love for
me will make you approve of my not stopping perpetually to puzzle over
the enigma.

So my present life brings extreme degrees of feeling, which cannot be
measured by time. Feeling produced, for instance, by beautiful leafage,
the dawn, a delicate landscape, a touching moon. These are all things in
which qualities at once fleeting and permanent isolate the human heart
from all preoccupations which lead us in these times either to
despairing anxiety, or to abject materialism, or again to a cheap
optimism, which I wish to replace by the high hope that is common to us
all, and which does not rely on human events.

All my tenderness and constant love for grandmother; for you, courage,
calm, perfect resignation without effort.

_November 23._

DEAR MOTHER,--Here we are arrived in our shelters in the second line. We
lodge in earth huts, where the fire smokes us out as much as it warms
us. The weather, which during the night was overcast, has given us a
charming blue and rosy morning. Unfortunately the woods have less to say
to me than the marvellous spaces of our front lines. Still, all is
beautiful here.

Yesterday my day was made up of the happiness of writing to you; I went
into the village church without being urged by a single romantic feeling
nor any desire for comfort from without. My conception of divine harmony
did not need to be supported by any outward form, or popular symbol.

Then I had the great good fortune to go with a carriage into the
surrounding country. Oh, the marvellous landscape--still of blue and
rosy colour, paled by the mist! All this rich and luminous delicacy
found definite accents in the abrupt spots made by people scattered
about the open. My landscape, always primitive in its precision, now
took on a subtlety of nuances, a richness of variety essentially modern.

One moment I recalled the peculiar outer suburbs of Paris with their
innumer