ddle of the
night. When the sun rose, flooding everything with warmth and light, the
old basilica[11] seemed suddenly to quiver; one might have said that it
wished to speak and sing. Giotto's frescos, but now invisible, awoke to
a strange life, you might have thought them painted the evening before
so much alive they were; everything was moving without awkwardness or
jar.

I returned six months later. A scaffold had been put up in the middle of
the nave; upon it an art critic was examining the paintings, and as the
day was overcast he threw upon the walls the beams of a lamp with a
reflector. Then you saw arms thrown out, faces grimacing, without unity,
without harmony; the most exquisite figures took on something fantastic
and grotesque.

He came down triumphant, with a portfolio stuffed with sketches; here a
foot, there a muscle, farther on a bit of face, and I could not refrain
from musing on the frescos as I had seen them bathed in sunlight.

The sun and the lamp are both deceivers; they transform what they show;
but if the truth must be told I own to my preference for the falsehoods
of the sun.

History is a landscape, and like those of nature it is continually
changing. Two persons who look at it at the same time do not find in it
the same charm, and you yourself, if you had it continually before your
eyes, would never see it twice alike. The general lines are permanent,
but it needs only a cloud to hide the most important ones, as it needs
only a jet of light to bring out such or such a detail and give it a
false value.

When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of the
Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining
aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere
the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I
looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the
chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but
crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish,
which seem to beg for pity.

It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot
accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want an
objective history in which the author will study the people as a chemist
studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for historic
evolution and social transformations as exact as those of chemical
combinations, and we must hope t