My memory is therefore, if I may so express it, vegetal.  Trees as well as flowers and fruits symbolize for me beings and emotions.  Plants as well as animals and stones filled my childhood with a mysterious charm.  When I was four years old I remained rapt in contemplation of the broken stones of the mountain, lying in heaps along the roads.  When struck they gave forth fire in the twilight.  When rubbed against one another they felt the burning heat.  I gathered pieces of marble from among them which seemed heavy with a water they had concealed within themselves.  The mica of the granite held my curiosity in a way which nothing could satisfy.  I felt that there was something that no one could tell me—­the life of the stones.

At the same age I was scolded because I carried away the artificial beetles from a hat of my mother.  I had the passion of collecting animals, I felt toward them so great a love that I wept if I thought them unhappy.  And I still endure a deep anguish when I remember the little nightingales which some one gave me and which pined away in the dining-room.  Still at the same age, in order to make me go to sleep, they had to place not far from me a bottle containing a tree-frog.  I knew that here was a faithful friend who would protect me against robbers.  The first time that I saw a stag-beetle, I was so overcome by the beauty of its horns that the longing to possess one became an actual torment.

The passion for plants did not develop until later, about the age of nine years, and I did not really begin to understand their life until about the age of fifteen.  I remember the circumstances under which it happened.  It was in summer, one Thursday, on a scorching afternoon.  I was passing through the botanical garden of a great city with my mother.  A white sun, dense blue shadows, and perfumes so heavy that one could almost feel them cling, made of this half desert spot a kingdom whose portal I crossed at last.

In the tepid and reddish-brown water of the ponds plants vegetated; some were leathery and gray, and others long, soft, and transparent.  But from the very heart of these poor and sad algae there rose into the very blue of the sky itself, green lance-like stalks whose rose and white umbels challenged the ardent day with their grace; water-lilies slept on their leaves as in a trustful afternoon sleep.

To the plants of the water, the plants of the earth answered.  I recall an alley where students, a handkerchief about the neck, were as if buried beneath the beauty of the leaves.  It was the alley of the umbelliferae.  The fennel and the ferula raised their crowns upon their stems with glistening sheaths.  The perfumes spoke to each other in the silence.  And one felt that a silent understanding went from plant to plant, and that over this isolated realm there hovered something like resignation.