The child is only a confused handful of confused and superficial propensities. Our deep instincts—­there they are.

I scatter the children, and they withdraw into the shadows unwillingly, and look at me with malice.  I am distressed by this maliciousness, which is born full-grown.  I am distressed also by this old dog’s lot.  They would not understand me if I acknowledged that distress; they would say, “And you who’ve seen so many wounded and dead!” All the same, there is a supreme respect for life.  I am not slighting intellect; but life is common to us along with poorer living things than ourselves.  He who kills an animal, however lowly it may be, unless there is necessity, is an assassin.

At the crossing I meet Louise Verte, wandering about.  She has gone crazy.  She continues to accost men, but they do not even know what she begs for.  She rambles, in the streets, and in her hovel, and on the pallet where she is crucified by drunkards.  She is surrounded by general loathing.  “That a woman?” says a virtuous man who is going by, “that dirty old strumpet?  A woman?  A sewer, yes.”  She is harmless.  In a feeble, peaceful voice, which seems to live in some supernatural region, very far from us, she says to me: 

“I am the queen.”

Immediately and strangely she adds, as though troubled by some foreboding: 

“Don’t take my illusion away from me.”

I was on the point of answering her, but I check myself, and just say, “Yes,” as one throws a copper, and she goes away happy.

* * * * * *

My respect for life is so strong that I feel pity for a fly which I have killed.  Observing the tiny corpse at the gigantic height of my eyes, I cannot help thinking how well made that organized speck of dust is, whose wings are little more than two drops of space, whose eye has four thousand facets; and that fly occupies my thought for a moment, which is a long time for it.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XXII

LIGHT

I am leaning this evening out of the open window.  As in bygone nights, I am watching the dark pictures, invisible at first, taking shape—­the steeple towering out of the hollow, and broadly lighted against the hill; the castle, that rich crown of masonry; and then the massive sloping black of the chimney-peopled roofs, which are sharply outlined against the paler black of space, and some milky, watching windows.  The eye is lost in all directions among the desolation where the multitude of men and women are hiding, as always and as everywhere.

That is what is.  Who will say, “That is what must be!”

I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted.  Now, I hope.