Things tenderly cared for show their gratitude to us, and are ever ready to offer us their soul when once we have refreshed it.  They are like those roses of the desert which expand infinitely when a little water brings back to their memory the azure of lost wells.

In my modest drawing-room there is a child’s chair.  My father played with it during his passage from Guadeloupe to France when he was seven years old.  He remembered distinctly that he sat on it in the ship’s saloon, and looked at pictures which the captain lent him.  The island wood of which it was made must have been stout for it withstood the games of a little boy.  The piece of furniture had drifted into my home, and slept there almost forgotten.  Its soul too had been asleep for many long years, because the child who had cherished it was no more, and no other children had come to perch upon it like birds.

But recently the house was made merry by my little niece who was just seven.  On my work-table she had found an old book with plates of flowers.  When I entered the room I found her sitting on the little chair in the lamplight, looking at the charming pictures, just as once a long time ago her grandfather had done.  And I was deeply touched.  And I said to myself that this little girl alone had been able to make live again the soul of the chair, and that the gentle soul of the chair had bewitched the candor of the child.  There was between her and this object a mysterious affinity.  The one could not help but go to the other, and it could be awakened by her alone.

Things are gentle.  They never do harm voluntarily.  They are the sisters of the spirits.  They protect us, and we let our thoughts rest upon them.  Our thoughts need them for resting-places as perfumes need the flowers.

The prisoner, whom no human soul can any longer console, must feel tenderly toward his pallet and his earthen jug.  When everything has been refused him by his fellows his obscure bed gives him sleep and his jug quenches his thirst.  And even if it separates him from all the world without, the very barrenness of his walls stands between him and his executioners.  The child who has been punished loves the pillow on which he cries; for when every one of an evening has hurt and scolded him, he finds consolation in the soul of the silent down.  It is like a friend who remains silent in order to calm a friend.

But it is not only out of the silence of things that is born their sympathy for us.  They have secret harmonies.  Sometimes they weep in the forest which Rene fills with his tempestuous soul; and sometimes they sing on the lake where another poet dreams.

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