The cousins from Saint-Pierre-de-la-Martinique, there were four of them I believe, would not be more than eighteen years old, and would be dressed in white muslin gowns.  They would laugh at some cake that had not come out right.  And my great aunts who were Huguenots, rigid but happy, with long chains of gold about their necks, would interpret the revelations of the Prophets to one another.  And five and seventy years would quaver in each of their cracked voices.  And my maternal grandsire at nineteen, with the green coat of a romantic student, all....

But the dream fades and the wind weeps.

* * * * *

In moss full of sunshine and transparent as an alga or an emerald, I have covered the roots of these first daisies of January.  They and the rare periwinkles and the furze are the only flowers of this season.  It is too much love doubtless which fills them.  They must be born in spite of the ice.  The white little bands of their flower-heads are tinged with violet at the ends, and surround the flowers which are greenish yellow like the under side of an old mushroom.  The muddy roots feel the plowed fields.  I have been so cruel as to pluck these flowers and now they are wretched; they are as wounded as animals could be; and see how, slowly as if they were moved by a terrible fear, the petals of the flowers curve in to cover and protect the sheathes of the minute corollas that I can no longer see.  Tenderly I try to raise these petals, but they resist me and I only succeed in murdering the plant.  Fool!  Why could I not let these flowers live on the edge of their ditch?  There they would have felt the fresh shrivelling of drinking in the sun, a bird would have touched them lightly, the proboscis of the mosquitoes would have sucked up their pollen, and they would have died gently by the side of their friends.

* * * * *

The stars of winter are beautiful when they are dusted on the slate-colored sky, and when in the hazy blue depth they light up the shreds of clouds.  I passed through the little town at six o’clock, when the candles behind the window-panes make square shadows move within the shops and shine upon the reddish mud of the pavements.  A dog trots by sniffing under the doorways.  A wagon whose oxen have slipped makes a grating noise.  A lantern flickers, a voice is heard.  The angles of the roofs are clear-cut.  The rest is consumed by the darkness.  Here and there, still, at great distances, a window of smoky rose, and I am at the top of the slope.

At the left an enormous star trembles.  It seems to breathe and its rays alternately elongate and withdraw again.  Its white fire appears to flow.  I look upon the constellations, behind which there are other spaces of constellations, which hide still more constellations, until the glance is lost in luminous embers like those of a hearth.

I am in no wise troubled by these stars.  I do not see in them worlds infinitely great or small according to the one with which we compare them.  They are in my thoughts, such as I see them:  the largest like hummingbirds the smallest like wasps.  The space which separates them one from another does not seem any greater than the pace with which I measure the road.  It is simply the sky of January above a little town.