29
Truly, it is not so bad to live. The eyes of the women are full
of shadow, but their hearts are soft and turn toward you. Calm
night, neither thy grandeur nor thy silence affright us, so well
dost thou know to soften them with graces and delights when
there will be nothing but the velvet birds that promenade under
the savant stars. Indulgent night, human night, thou hast laid
thyself upon our souls with such softness that they bow gently
and respond likewise with a gesture of welcome. It is this
moment which I have chosen to approach myself, and like a
neighbor with unbottoned vest, and dragging slippers, who from
behind his hedge bids you good evening,—it is thus that I want
to approach you and I know that you will not repulse me.
Do not mind that I speak to you of my little ambitions and
my petty chagrins. For the moment it will be a pleasant grotes-
querie. You know quite well that I wish to speak about all of
us tonight. I regarded you before coming, and each of us with
his mannerisms, his dreams, his habitual tom-tom, seemed like
some monster engulfed in his eternal solitude. But here we are
come together again, and how much it seems to me that we have
created in common a richness of which we certainly did not
know ourselves the depositaries.
God knows, however, how all of us (You and I, I say
naively) are ridiculous, trivial and miserable. Regard this crea
ture who is always disoriented, who wails over himself, who
adores himself, who abuses himself, and who truly lives neither
for heaven nor earth. He eats, he gesticulates, he makes love,
he sleeps. The worst of it is that he thinks. And what does he
think, the wretch. He thinks of himself incessantly, he thinks
that he thinks; and his thought appears so capital to him that he
desires to disseminate it about him as I am doing now. By good
luck this farce comes to an end, and your nice gentleman is
stretched out, his limbs nicely arranged, his mouth still bab
bling with fear, in this bit of earth that dared to soil his shoes.
Let him repose in peace! He had not been very happy.
Let him rest in peace. There about the fresh earth that has
just been disturbed, I remark a puff of wind, and the agitation
of confused presences. What! Isn’t it all over! Are not six
feet of earth enough to hide a human animal up to the time of
his final destruction! I hesitate to recognize you, I recognize
you, I rediscover you, with a desire to laugh and console myself,
—thoughts of this man believed dead. Smiles and tears, dis
quietudes, struggles, hopes, defeats, you who subsist, imponder
able riches, you whom we receive as our patrimony, whom we
shall keep, whom we shall develope with whatever power we
have, whom we shall transmit in our turn, and who will live the
precarious life of the living.