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In the garden the perfume of the lilacs suddenly make me feel ill because I am horribly sad.

Nevertheless, lilacs, you are dear to me since childhood.  Then I thought your clusters were the beautiful polished images of a box of toys.

And you, oh lilacs, have also haunted an orchard which I knew well in my youth.  In this orchard there were hedge-hogs.  They glided along old beams.  How innocent and gentle the hedge-hogs are in spite of their quills!  I remember my emotion one winter’s evening, when I found one of them at the threshold of the kitchen; it had taken flight from the snow, and was poking its little nose into the refuse left there....

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I love the creatures of the night, the screech-owls with their graceful flight, the bats, the badgers, all the timid beasts which glide through the air or in the grass and of which we know so little.  What festivals do they hold amid the plants, their sisters?

At the hour when man is at rest, the rabbits, silvered by the dew, bound over the mint of the furrow and hold their conventicles; the frogs croak in the marsh and make it ripple; the glowworms filter their soft and humid yellow light; the mole bores the meadow; the nightingale sobs like a fountain; the owl utters sad laughter as if it too, however timidly, were trying to have a share in the joy of God.

How I would like to be a creature of the night, a hare trembling in a hedge of hawthorn, a badger grazed by the leaves of the juicy green corn.  My only care would have been to safeguard my physical being.  I would not have loved.  I would not have hoped.