Then, too, when at dusk I come out into the open, what an ecstasy!  I won’t speak to you of this, for I feel I must be silent about these joys.  They must not be exposed:  they are birds that love silence. . . .  Let us confine our speech to that essential happiness which is not easily affrighted—­the happiness of feeling ourselves prepared equally for all.

November 29, in the morning (from a billet).

MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,—­Yesterday evening I left the first line trenches in broken weather which, in the night, after my arrival here, turned into rain.  I watch it falling through the fog from my favourite window.  If you like I will tell you of the wonders I saw yesterday.

From the position described in my letter of yesterday, can be seen, as I have often written to you, the most marvellous horizon.  Yesterday a terrible wind rent a low veil of clouds which grew red at their summits.  Perhaps the background of my ‘Haheyna’ will give you a faint idea of what it was.  But how much more majestic and full of animation was the emotion I experienced yesterday.

The hills and valleys passed in turn from light to shade, now defined, now veiled, according to the movement of the mists.  High up, blue spaces fringed with light.

Such was the beauty of yesterday.  Shall I speak of the evenings that went before, when, on my way along the road, the moon brought out the pattern of the trees, the pathetic Calvaries, the touching spectacle of houses which one knew were ruins, but which night seemed to make stand forth again like an appeal for peace.

I am glad to see you like Verlaine.  Read the fine preface by Coppee to the selected works, which you will find in my library.

His fervour has a spontaneity, I might almost say a grossness, which always repels me a little, just because it belongs to that kind of Catholic fervour which on its figurative side will always leave me cold.  But what a poet!

He has been my almost daily delight both here and when I was in Paris; often the music of his Paysages Tristes comes back to me, exactly expressing the emotion of certain hours.  His life is as touching as that of a sick animal, and one almost wonders that a like indignity has not withered the exquisite flowers of his poetry.  His conversion, that of an artist rather than of a thinker, followed on a great upsetting of his existence which resulted from grave faults of his. (He was in prison.)

In the Lys Rouge Anatole France has drawn a striking portrait of him, under the name of Choulette; perhaps you will find we have this book.

In Sagesse the poems are fine and striking because of the true impulse and sincerity of the remorse.  A little as though the cry of the Nuit de Mai resounded all through his work.

Our two great poets of the last century, Musset and Verlaine, were two unhappy beings without any moral principle with which to stake up their flowers of thought—­yet what magnificent and intoxicating flowers.